Errata: This is the wrong page.

Clever, inspired, beautiful. Brings back wonderful memories of watching (and reading) Cosmos as a child.



Thanks to Chris Hardwick (who is completely awesome, BTW) for bringing it to my attention.

And of course, many more variants. Highlights include Survival Chess, Portal Chess, Hypnotoad Chess, and of course, Chuck Norris Chess.

March yourself right into the kitchen or dining room or orchard or whatever, and eat a peach. Go ahead, I'll wait.

This is a dream come true. apostrophree (the lower-case a is intentional) is a proxy software service that automatically corrects common errors of spelling, punctuation, grammar, and usage in blogs and forums. Hallelujah!

Comment correcting software closes $25m funding

And here is an equally informative article which illuminates the new service in some detail.

( Spoiler for the impatient )

UPDATE: Gah, there was a broken link for the punchline. It is fixed now.

Not just solar -- this would be a big win for any kind of "environmental" energy source (wind, waves, caged toddlers) that isn't always on.

> [...] part of the aquatic process transforming fish waist into nitrogen.
Fish don't have waists. That's why they seldom wear pants.

Tim Schafer killed the idea because he strongly believes in games being "wish fulfillments," guessing that not many people fantasize about being an insane ostrich.

I'm sure those of you not yet on Gmail have noticed the recent increase in curiously-themed spam email messages that are somehow eluding current spam filters. I recently received this particular email subject line and I thought it just took the cake. And it's really upsetting that Nazis can brainwash them so young.

This is bizarre, yet strangely compelling: Other people's dreams as four-panel web comics. The original referrer (Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert) put it very well:

Few things fascinate me more than seeing something work when it really shouldn't. For example, as you know, nothing is more boring than listening to another person talk about the dream he had last night. Therefore, you would assume, a comic that is nothing but an account of a stranger's dream should be the most uninteresting comic in the universe. And yet it isn't. Artist Jesse Reklaw turns people's dreams into four-panel comics on the Internet. They have no coherent story line and no punch lines. If you read only one, you would probably scratch your head and wonder what he was smoking. But if you read several it feels like accessing the dream part of your brain while being awake. It's the strangest sensation. Check it out.

I've rediscovered old radio shows in the past few years, almost certainly due to performing several of them with Lux Radio Theater. While it's true that radio series were largely wiped out by the new medium of television, they remain ideal entertainment in situations where your visual attention is required elsewhere -- such as in the car. Thanks to the Internet and my iPod (and its car stereo hookup), it's easy to enjoy some of the best radio shows of the era during my commute.

"The man in the saddle is angular and long-legged. His skin is sun-dyed brown. The gun in his holster is gray steel and rainbow mother-of-pearl, its handle, unmarked. People called them both, The Six Shooter."

So opened The Six Shooter, the only radio series staring James Stewart, although he made numerous radio appearances. In this 1953 radio western, Mr. Stewart played Britt Ponsett, a man with a reputation for having a fast gun. Mr. Stewart portrayed a character very different from a hard, tough-talking gunslinger. In this series, the hero is a slow-talking, thinking man who doesn't reach for his gun first and ask questions later. He's ready with his gun, but first looks for alternatives to violence.

It was sophisticated, well-written, and delightful. More Gunsmoke than Long Ranger, the series was aimed at an older audience. And like that of Garrison Keillor or Charlton Heston, you just can't stop listening to Jimmy Stewart's voice in the role. I could go on about its many virtues, but needless to say the series is easily one of my very favorites.

Yet for all of this, it lasted only a single season. I've often wondered why, given its star and its technical and artistic merit. I finally discovered the reason (or at least a reason) this morning:

One of the reasons for this was that the only companies that offered to sponsor the series were tobacco companies. Jimmy Stewart was against the advertising of cigarettes and repeatedly turned them down. With only 39 shows in the series, it is frequently overlooked in favor of more long-running Westerns. Don't pass up on this one; it's one of the best.

And there you have it. Yes, there's his Mr. Smith and George Bailey and the others, but this man was a real hero where it counts. His humble and heroic military service is the stuff of legend, though perhaps not entirely unexpected given the state of the world in 1941. But in 1953, everyone smoked. I recently fast-forwarded through a looooong radio PSA from the era -- delivered by one of radio's stars, no less -- delivering the latest detailed medical report concluding that smoking presents no health risks whatsoever. While it's easy to point and shake our heads about these things now, even then Jimmy Stewart would have none of it advertised on his show. And the consequence of standing by his principles was a canceled program. That takes mettle.

Thank you again for everything, Mr. Stewart; with this, you've topped yourself yet again.

Not only is Portal a game deserving of more five-syllable complimentary adjectives than are present in the English language, it also embodies perhaps the most succinct expression of my personal philosophy. To wit:

At the beginning of the Portal development process, we sat down as a group to decide what philosopher or school of philosophy our game would be based on. That was followed by about fifteen minutes of silence and then someone mentioned that a lot of people like cake.

Brilliant.

Preamble: Axiom #1 of entertainment media: no one has any good, original ideas any more, so we endlessly reanimate our entertainment dead into new forms. Some are better than the originals, some are not. Perhaps more often than not, "better than the original" is not such a high bar to surmount.

Those of you who know me may be aware of my smug, almost contemptuous avoidance of what passes for modern television and film entertainment these days. I know that there are a few gems out there, and that the situation has always been this bad. This is merely our incarnation of bread and circuses.

But when I was a eleven-year-old boy, I loved me some Knight Rider. It had everything you needed: a kick-ass, high-tech, high performance, talking supercar driven by a paladin in a black leather jacket, both overseen by a benevolent patriarch and mechanic-babe in a mobile base of operations. They traveled the country and meted out justice as a high-tech Lone Ranger. Did I mention the kick-ass, high-tech, high performance, talking supercar?

Only later, when I happened to see a few minutes of an episode in my adult life, did I realize how juvenile and mediocre the show really was. Its poor acting, banal dialogue, and contrived story elements seared a black mark on my otherwise fond memory of it. And perhaps the less said about David Hasselhoff the better. Oh well; for what is was, and for who I was at the time, the show worked. It was also apparently a substantial commercial success.

And just like all other successful and semi-successful entertainment properties of yore, they are remaking it. Ladies and gentlemen, I present: Ford's Knight Rider brought to you by Ford.

Yes, the new, updated KITT (the aforementioned talking supercar) is now a Ford Mustang Shelby GT500KR, not a Pontiac Firebird as in the original. That's fine with me; by all accounts, the current generation Mustang is a visually amazing car. The show has a whole new cast of characters, which goes without saying. It will be modern and sexy and hip and all that stuff. It is also likely to be of very poor quality, just like all other television programs, statistically speaking.

But here's the wild card: Val Kilmer will play the voice of KITT.

Yes, that Val Kilmer, the sixth most awesome man ever. Brilliant! I know, it won't mean much -- and it won't single-handedly save the show -- but I think that's just neat. What's strange about this, though, is that Mr. Kilmer was not originally slated to voice KITT; as of a few weeks ago, all of the dialogue was already recorded by another actor. That man (Will Arnett) has apparently done extensive voice work for years as "the voice of GMC trucks". And Ford is actively -- and I do mean actively -- participating in marketing the new Knight Rider. When GM found out about this, they asked Mr. Arnett to quit the show.

I'm going to repeat that: The voice actor for the new Ford KITT had to leave because he did voice overs for GM. Seriously.

I'll skip the rants about omnipresent advertising in film and television and the scandalous financial shenanigans that studios engage in to minimize operating profits and maximize bonuses for depraved and vampiric creative executives because, frankly, that's not the point of my article. Feel free to use your imagination to fill it in, if you like. I will instead simply note with uneasy amusement that a marketing turf war between two rival companies can alter the casting decisions of a creative project.

For what it's worth, I hope the new show succeeds. The pre-adolescent me thought its predecessor was pretty cool, even thought the adult me knows otherwise.

PS: The Wikipedia page on the new Knight Rider has good info and, as usual for Wikipedia, great footnotes.

Most recently, it was love3angle taking espionage photos of me during my stay at a manor for some frightfully important turn-of-the-century society soirée with inexplicably modern bathrooms. Before that, I was suddenly about to perform in an It's a Wonderful Life radio show again, but this time with a completely different theater group with which I had no rehearsals. "But it's going to be fine, trust me," I was assured.

Before that, we discovered that we were unknowingly living in only the kept-up rear section of our (somehow suddenly different) home, and that there were several more walled-off, dilapidated rooms in the un-lived-in "front" area. Okay, that one is easy, since we've long fretted about the lack of space in our current home.

Before that was the reappearance of that terrible house with the strange room layout and the convoluted crawlspaces to access its other areas. That particular figment has been with me for decades. I'm sure it's a metaphor for the compartmentalization of my life, but it's an unusually persistent and unsettling image for an otherwise happy and content person.

And then a baby was crying. Okay, that wasn't a dream, but the rest have become of late more bizarre with each passing night. I wish I could remember more of the details. Ah, dreams, you fleeting and perplexing muse!

colleency beat me to it, but I'm happy to report that our radio show of It's a Wonderful Life on Friday went exceedingly well. I have been living and breathing James-Stewart-as-George-Bailey for months now, and it was such a treat to have it all come together, and so well. I imagine I'll never look at the movie in quite the same way, but definitely all for the better.

(Ironically, I had not actually seen the film until my late twenties. It was so omnipresent at Christmastime growing up that I supposed I'd "get around to seeing it sometime", which never really happened until I was much older. When I finally did, I was immediately struck by how dark and profound and moving it was, in contrast to the usual Christmas fare. It is now one of my very favorite movies of all time -- as it should be -- but I could not have predicted it from "that movie that's always on around Christmastime".)

Back to the show: It's been a while since I've been played a part with such emotional range as George Bailey. He's a great character, don't get me wrong. But when his first major scene involves being beaten as a child, it's a real emotional punch in the gut to perform. Extremes of love, anger, joy, fear, despair, and triumph -- they're all in there. Nicely done, Mr. Capra.

Impersonating James Stewart was both a blessing and a challenge. It aided greatly in evoking the original, yet I can only approach, never match, Stewart's voice and tremendous acting ability. Unlike our past radio shows, we retained the original actor voices for the main four characters, only recasting the secondary roles with fun period character actors. We felt it was the right thing to do to be true to the source, and it worked out very well in practice.

Special thanks to co-producers and co-stars Shawn and Colleen, who are -- if this seems possible -- even more amazing and wonderful than you think. And to the rest of the cast and crew who gave their all, and to everyone who came to see the show. Merry Christmas, movie house!

Most lots sell their Christmas trees with a temporary stand made from a longitudinally split two-by-four in an X shape. It is simple, cheap, and effective. But woe betide he who attempts to remove the temporary stand so he can place the tree into a regular stand. Specifically, these temporary stands are attached with no less than four or five (!) six-inch-long framing nails, AND a quarter-inch thick, six-inch-long railroad spike of a nail as the main support. To make matters worse, this year all of the nails were deeply countersunk, which meant sawing off the first stand slat just to get at the heads.

The improvement from my last year's arsenal is the addition of my new double-edge pull saw and nail pry bar. These definitely made short work of the base itself and provided some much-needed bite on the nails, respectively. (This Japanese-style saw is indispensable for trimming branches and breaking down the tree after Christmas, too.) But even with the (small) pry bar those nails are just too long and grippy to get out without a longer lever. You can't even get a crowbar in there since the nails are packed within half an inch of each other. Besides that, you only have a two or three inch trunk radius to use as a lever base; the amount of force imparted from the lever pull will snap the half-inch-thick stand slat in no time.

I was eventually able to use the pry bar to dig directly into the nail shanks (nice!) and work them out a little bit to get the claw hammer in there. You can then use the broken slats to act as shims as you work the nail head farther and farther out of the trunk using the hammer claw. It's slow going because of the friction over the length of the nail in that very green trunk wood.

This method still won't get the huge main nail out, though; for that, you have to get out the vise grips and work it out very slowly. Clamp the grips directly onto the shank perpendicular to the axis and rotate the grips back and forth, pulling all the while. And make sure not to touch the nail once it's out, as it will be very hot from all that friction.

It seems like one could bypass all this nail-extraction business with a metal-rated hacksaw blade, cutting through all six nails and leaving the shanks in the tree. But you'd have to cut through the whole trunk diameter's worth of green wood to level the tree anyway, gumming up your saw teeth. I wonder if that's what most people do. Several years ago we bought an expensive tree which came pre-leveled and with a cheap plastic bowl thing attached to the trunk base before the stand slats were nailed on. Just place it in your living room, pour the water in, and you're done -- no tools required! Maybe that's why it cost over twice as much as the ones we've been buying recently.

But you know what? I only paid forty dollars for a seven-foot Noble Fir and was able to put my toys to work doing something manly. Now that's definitely worth something.

I was listening to last week's In Our Time (BBC Radio 4) program/podcast about the Fibonacci Sequence. (You should really listen to this show. It is "The History of Ideas", in a nutshell, and is consistently thought-provoking and delightful. Put it on our iPod or burn it to CD and listen in the car.) This particular episode brought back a memory of my first serious academic exposure to the subject.

In twelfth grade, I took two semesters of Calculus at CSU Sacramento. My professor was fantastic; I regard him as one of the very best college instructors of my academic life, even including -- ironically -- my four years at UCLA. During the section on series, we touched on the Fibonacci Numbers, one of the more well-known number sequences in mathematics. Starting with 0 and 1, each successive Fibonacci number is the sum of the two preceding ones, so you have 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, and so on. Child's play. While seeming to be merely a numerical curiosity, the sequence appears all over nature; it is the solution to a whole host of spiral and "packing" problems, such as the optimal number and placement of stems and leaves on plants, the arrangement of seeds on a sunflower plant, and even the pattern of little diamonds on a pineapple.

Our professor put forth a challenge: Given the two starting numbers and the method by which one generates each successive Fibonacci number, derive a continuous function to generate an arbitrary number in the sequence without having to count up each previous one leading up to it. Moreover, such a function would of course give results for even non-integer inputs. Even though the class had previously done basic curve fitting with basic boundary conditions, never with procedurally generated sequences like this. We thought he was out of his mind.

Imp that he was, he proceeded to astound us with a proof that strained the limits of our mathematical skills. Strangely, the resulting (relatively compact) formula contained all manner of fractional components and square-roots of five. Though it seemed unlikely, any integer plugged in to this formula would indeed give an nice integer result. (Woe be it to any non-integer input wandering by, however.) We were astounded.

In geometry and elsewhere, the Golden Ratio, defined as when the sum of two quantities -- such as the length of the sides of a rectangle -- and the larger one is the same as the ratio between the larger and the smaller one. The easiest way see it is in the Golden Rectangle, one whose side lengths are in the golden ratio. If you remove a square section from the rectangle, the remainder is another golden rectangle, and so on, forever. The Golden Rectangle is extremely common in the arts; regardless of whether the artist or architect did any mathematical calculations beforehand, it still gives a proportion that is very pleasing to the eye. It also appears frequently in nature, such as in the spirals of shells. (Believe it or not, I first learned of the Golden Rectangle in school from Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land. What an awesome little educational movie. Do they still make stuff like that any more?)

The Golden Ratio is exactly ( 1 + sqrt(5) ) / 2, or about 1.618. When I looked back on our "strange" Fibonacci formula, I discovered that all of the seemingly out-of-place fractions and square-roots were all variations on ( 1 + sqrt(5) ) / 2. In other words, the Fibonacci sequence is wholly derived from the Golden Ratio, and is essentially the whole-number special case. Very nice. Beautiful, in fact.

It is immensely satisfying when something complex-looking arises from such simple fundamental rules. Likewise, it is astounding when something as subjective such as "what is aesthetically pleasing" turns out to be explicitly proscribed by a perfect little mathematical equation. Who would have thought that our artistic sense would be so tied to the square-root of five? Or that shell or plant spirals are based on arbitrarily adding numbers together? I love that we need not understand the underlying mathematics to intrinsically -- instinctively -- see these particular instances of complexity as having "order" and "perfection", and therefore, "beauty".

Dear Our-Employers-in-Two-to-Eight-Story-Buildings: Please let us use the stairwells to get to our floor. It's the kind of simple, low impact, just-a-part-of-your-regular-day exercise of which we should avail ourselves. Thank you.

I once worked at a software company that took up an entire two-story building. It was a tall second story, too, so that internal flight of stairs was an extra-long one. I worked in the IT department and ranged all over the building helping employees with their computers. I was up and down those stairs all day long; I wasn't even thinking about exercise, but I was in great shape. When exercise becomes work -- as in working out -- we have to plan, to reserve time, to ensure we're accomplishing our goals. In contrast, when your everyday actions incorporate low levels of regular physical activity, there are no such impediments; you just happen to stay in shape simply by living your life.

Yes, yes, this is all very obvious, of course. But I mention it because so few of us do it.

I'm in good physical shape right now; I am blessed with a stable metabolism and I eat well. But I do need more frequent cardiovascular challenge in my everyday life. Fortunately, I live on a second story (note to self: buy a two-story house) and my company building has open stairs in our detached parking structure, so at least there's that. And I take stairs absolutely whenever and wherever I can. (I realize that climbing a few flights of stairs is not metabolically aerobic, but it's better than nothing.) But like most of my white-collar brethren, I work on a computer all during the business day; it's not like pouring concrete or moving crates for a living.

I'm aware of the security concerns of opening up company building stairwells, particularly their outside entrances, if any. But has that become such a liability that we can no longer use our stairwells except as a fire escape? Somehow, I don't think even the Otis Elevator Company envisioned such a future. With open stairs, I assure you that many of us would be on them every day, just living our lives, effortlessly staying in shape.

Wait a second -- I have a nearly-ten-month-old daughter on the verge of walking. I'll soon get all the physical activity I need.

Never mind.

Grammar Girl writes and hosts an excellent podcast on improving your writing. While I've long bemoaned the deterioration of modern English usage, the mispronunciation of "the" before a vowel sound mystifies me. And hearing it mispronounced one too many times on a podcast about English usage pushed me over the edge:



Some people's pet peeve is its vs. it's; mine is the vs. the. Ah, the irony of writing about a usage problem that occurs only in spoken English.

I rarely ever write stuff like this, and I realize it sounds completely pompous, sorry. But the incorrect usage is so frequent these days, it's sad. And if you're one of those who regularly makes this mistake, why, I'll call the Grammar Squad!

Wait, I'm on the Grammar Squad.

Wait, I think I am the Grammar Squad.

I couldn't go through with it, even in my own dream.

I often preoccupy myself with the structure and plan of a new endeavor to the detriment of doing the thing itself. To wit: I have spent far too long now customizing the various account details here on LiveJournal instead of actually writing anything. It is easy to draw parallels with one's tendency toward impulse: Are you the sort of person who anticipates, plans, considers alternatives, second-guesses, and optimizes your decisions and actions, or do you jump in to a new project with both proverbial feet? Setting aside for now the relative merits of these two approaches, this is a token of the latter to overcome my propensity for the former. Please disregard appropriately.

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. --Marcus Aurelius