Halloween

Boo.

There. You're scared now.

Like this raccoon:

See, this is why I post bear pictures.  They're not fucking jerks like these apes.

See?

"No, I looked behind the milk. I'm telling you, there isn't any more cake."

• "I shit you not."
• Gummy bear studies.
• Professor Oak isn't that responsible.  See also: giving a portable lightning generator to a ten year old.
• Google has a really nice election poll viewer.
• I'm going to claim this as partial justification for my claims yesterday.  I spent part of the day asking "what can you do with $8e9 that you can't with $4e9?"  Giving that additional $4e9 to your educational charity seems like a reasonable answer.
• I haven't had a chance to read this yet, but I assume everyone saw it already. Call of Cthulhu analysis under general relativity.

This is worthy of it's own post, right?

This.  Even down to the song.  Two-Mix is terrible music for driving (you can't not go 120 bpmmph) and exercising (because although your heart can go 120 bpm, the rest of you can't).

Tuesday: Well, that killed any hope of getting something done this evening

My sink was clogged, as was my neighbor's.  They were going to unclog it from his side today.  I get home to discover my kitchen floor covered in water and a hole in the trap on my kitchen sink.  No, this is not the first time this has happened.  It's a new neighbor now, though, and he was using a proper plumber, so that's an improvement.

The "good" news is that the building manager was able to get the plumber to come back out immediately, fix the pipe, and properly clear out the clog.  So I guess it's all better now, but it still sucked.  Plus, I'm pretty sure that once one of those foam kitchen mat things gets soaked, it's probably better to just throw it out and buy a new one.  I guess I'm going to Target this weekend.

Rear wheel drive bear is having some problems.

• And then there were red pandas, and everything was better.  Especially after picture #3.
• Shashank Tripathi is a douchebag.
• David Brooks thinks that appeasing terrorists is the best way to deal with them.  Sorry, not terrorists, Republicans.
• Cookies!
• Pebbles is my favorite character, despite only being in the comic for less than 10% of it's lifetime.
• Star Wars.  I'm going to be crazy here, and suggest that George is sick or something.  According to this, his pre-deal worth was in the $3.5e9 range, so this deal basically doubles that.  This suggests however, that the true value of Lucasfilm is much higher, in the $30e9 range.  I couldn't find enough info to make my own estimate, but let's say that's not implausibly out of range.  So, the deal is an order of magnitude lower than it probably should be.  Now, postulate the George is sick (or something).  He wants to be sure that things are taken care of, so he signs a deal that ensures his hand-picked executives are in place and that everything is protected by legions of mouse-eared lawyers.  Plus, he immediately has a bunch of money to do whatever he wants now, before this hypothetical illness (or something) gets too bad.  Alternate explanation: he's sick of dealing with people bitching about Episode 1, and decided to sell to Disney out of the same level of "fuck-you-itude" he demonstrated here.

Monday: Where did that hour go?

Gone.  I thought it was like 9:15.  Turns out it's 10:26.  Oops.  Let's do the quick list of things that are better today than before:

• A/C back at work.  My office is now suitable for things to be done.
• Because of that, I largely finished Project A, I just need to test it.  Woo proper productivity temperature.
• My neighbor's sink is clogged too, and so they're going to fix it from that side.  Not something I need to worry about, I guess.

"Attack!"

"WTF was that supposed to be?"

• Mitt Romney: still a fucking idiot.
• This guy: also a fucking idiot.  Let's go slowly, in case he tracks incoming links:  You want to know the true population results, but know that you have three segments of the population P = [p1 p2 p3], each of which have a fraction Pf = [A B (1 - (A+B))].  Now, you sample a number of people related to the accuracy you're looking for.  This is generally a Poissonian distributed thing, so you get an idea of how big a sample you need from N ~ 1 / (error^2).  Let's say we want a good result without having to ask a bunch of people.  3%.  Sure, therefore we need something like 1000 people.  Nice round number.  Now, we ask those 1000 people if they like option X or Y better, and then ask them to identify as a member of populations P.  Now, you take the counts of population K = [k1 k2 k3] as well as the fraction of that population supporting one of the binary options F = [x1 x2 x3].  Now, assume you have the population fractions given above.  Now, calculate a weight factor from W = Pf / K.  Now do the weighted mean: sum(W .* F) / sum(W).  There.  You've corrected your survey based on the expected real population based on the observed population sampling.  Boom.  All that shit about "oversampling" works out to be fucking nonsense, isn't it?  Now, exercise for the reader: calculate the expected fraction errors for each population segment and not for the entire survey.
• This dog: best use of stairs ever.
• Michael Alexander Salzhauer, MD: pretty fucking creepy.
• I like how the postdocs are largely in the "unlikely to get a faculty position" category.
• I can't tell if this is "cool" or "cute."  Coolute?  That's not a word, is it.  Oh well. Licia Ronzulli: best Member of European Parliament ever.

Sunday: East coast gets a fancy hurricane/blizzard/death storm, I only get a crappy tsunami

And that tsunami isn't cancelling the telecon tomorrow morning.  I miss having snow days.  I guess last week was "Air Conditioning Days," but the email I got today suggests that that's all fixed now.  Oh well.

I also need to remember to never go to Ala Moana if I don't have to, especially on the weekends.  It's full of the following set of people:

1. Dad incapable of understanding why his toddler daughter is screaming and that maybe he should go figure that out.
2. Family that insists everyone hold hands in a line, blocking anyone from walking around their slow asses.
3. Family that have a parade of Dad + Empty Stroller A, Kid A, Kid B, Mom + Stroller B.  Seriously.  I saw like four iterations of this.  And they're perfectly spaced out so you have to wait for the entire train to meander by to get around them.
4. Tourists with the mall map held out in front of them like it's some sort of shield to protect them against Shopping Tigers.
5. People who have no fucking clue where they are, so they stumble around like a drunk, and then look at you like you're the asshole for saying, "excuse me" when you try to get around the stumbly dance.
6. Lady too busy talking on her cell phone to watch where she's driving her stroller. Into my leg, asshole.  That's where you're driving.

Plus, I didn't find anything I was looking for, because things were either closed and shuttered up, or subscribe to the new fashion trend of "fucking ugly shit."  Also: Macy's decided to make their store unidirectional by blocking off the non-functional down escalator.  Isn't the joke that broken escalators are just stairs?  Can't we just walk down it?

Anyway, then I bought cream, and came home and made colcannon.  I used more pork and less cabbage than before, and paired it with Cotswold cheese, as that works perfectly.

And then while cleaning, I discovered that my kitchen sink drain isn't actually draining properly.  I guess that means a call to the property manager this week to call out the plumber.  Again.

So here are today's pictures.

Ghost squirrel!

Robbie.  Huh. I never noticed his purse before.

"What? I'm a bear.  I eat things.  Sometimes those things explode blood all over.  Happens all the time with cupcakes.  Wait, no, that's not what they're called.  Seals.  Yeah, not cupcakes.  Could you imagine that? That'd be crazy!"

• Why is Mitt Romney actually being supported by anyone?  Especially if you live in a place that floods, or gets hit by hurricanes, or you know, fancy hurricane/blizzard/death storms.
• People are still having trouble with the NYTimes paywall?  My work computer has a bookmark thing that strips out the block, and at home, I just remove the hex string and that makes it work.  Or I read articles linked from twitter.  Really, it's more of a pay-curb or something.
• Why is Mitt Romney actually being supported by anyone?  Especially if you live in a place that makes cars, or have any concern about not fucking lying all the time.
• Cool, NYTimes webcam so you can watch NYC fight the Death Storm.

Saturday: Adventure!

Part 1: Lunch!

The plan for today was to do some editing on that paper, and try to get it moving towards a final draft.  I decided that the best way to do this was to go someplace to sit down and have lunch, and make it a working lunch.  Last time I went to Kona Brewing Company, I wasn't that pleased.  It was probably time to try them again, and see if things have improved.

Because garlic + Gorgonzola is the best way to start a meal.

Note that that isn't Dr. Pepper.  The menu claims they have it, but that's apparently a lie.  Anyway, roasted garlic and Gorgonzola with tasty bread is always a good thing.  Having an appetizer also helped stretch out the time I had to work on the paper, although I still only got about a third of the way through it (although a lot of those final pages are figures, so that probably doesn't count).
 

Someone really needs to be doing a better job on the pass.

I went with the meatloaf over the pot roast, and ended up regretting it.  The tomato/ginger chutney and queso  were a bit odd with the meatloaf, but all in all not a bad combination.  The gravy was good, and helped the entire dish.

What didn't help was the fact that the meatloaf was overcooked, and seriously burnt on the bottom.  Had I not gotten an appetizer, I probably would have been significantly more unhappy having close to a quarter of my main dish be charcoal.  I guess what this means is that Kona Brewing is pretty much not a place to go to anymore.  That's kind of unfortunate, since the breeze off the marina and the ducks swimming by make it a reasonably nice place to be.  It's just that they seem to be failing at the basic concept of cooking.

Nice place to be, just not to eat, I guess.

Part 2: Movies!

The other reason for driving to the eastern edge of the island was to catch the new Silent Hill movie.  Most of the closer theaters were only showing it in 3D, and I'm not really a big fan of wearing silly glasses just to watch a movie.  I guess no one else had the same idea, since the entire audience for the showing I went to consisted of me and one girl.  Maybe people were listening to the reviews for the movie?

Because that's where the script came from.

I'm not really going to claim that this was a cinema classic, because it's clearly a movie that was written and produced for people like me who know the entire backstory and are willing to fill in gaps in the story with prior knowledge.  The problem with doing this is that the movie tends to oscillate between long conversations filled with exposition and short comments that reference bits of the games.  Everyone in the movie is named after someone from the games.  Everyone.  The random guy at the end driving a truck? Travis Grady.  Down to the shirt and vest.  It's nice to do a handful of those things, but to make the entire movie around that?  It's a bit much.

And that's from someone who mostly liked the movie.

They clearly tried to tie the story from the first movie (which was kind of a rewrite of the first game) with the Silent Hill 3 story (which in turn was a direct sequel of the first game).  This meant blending the mythology a bit, but it was largely coherent and reasonable.  A bit of a retcon feeling, but in a way to make the first movie match the games more.

Things that were good:

• "Names don't matter."  Nice way to explain why Sean Bean has a different name now.
• Getting someone who looks a lot like Heather to play Heather.
• The transitions from regular to otherworld.
• Robbie the Rabbit.
• Birthday cake with cooked dog.  At least I assume it was the dog.  Anything else wouldn't make sense.
• Malcolm McDowell?  That was unexpected, to say the least.
• Steel pipe.  The steel pipe is always a welcome sight.
• Ok, I'm grasping a bit.

Things that weren't good:

• Obvious sequel bait with the prison bus from Silent Hill: Downpour.
• Heather didn't get the taser from her dresser when she returned home.  I'm picky.
• Gratuitous use of Pyramid Head, especially in a pseudo-hero role.  He's not a hero.  He's cool, but he's pretty much the physical realization of the guilt of a murderer.  Plus: rapist.  These are not hero things.
• Using Vincent as an unnecessary love interest.  Silent Hill isn't a love story.  Plus, crazy game Vincent is a better character.  "They look like monsters to you? {creepy laugh}"
• Gore.  Sure, that's an odd thing to list for a horror movie, but gore takes away from the psychological aspect of things.
• 3D.  A lot of scenes made it clear that "This is in 3D."  Meh.

Anyway, they made me a movie, and weren't sad when me and one other person showed up.  Now, go make a movie of Silent Hill 2, keep the story intact, and watch people claim that it's the best video game movie ever made.

Part 3: Tsunami?

After the movie, I stopped at WF to get groceries, so I can make something for dinner tomorrow.  While waiting at the deli, the guy in front of me told the girl at the deli that a tsunami warning had been issued.  Huh. Unexpected.  Not as much as Malcolm McDowell, but still.

Deli Girl was a bit unhappy, since she was scheduled to be working until the time the tsunami was supposed to hit.  Twitter tells me that they closed early, so that's good.  I continued my regular shopping, but it was clear that some people were panic buying, since no normal person buys six gallons of water, especially at WF.  On the drive home, I noticed other people panic buying gas, with something like a dozen people lined up into the street.  If a tsunami hits and messes up the gas supply, where are you going to be driving?

In any case, the tsunami was supposed to hit fifteen minutes ago, so it's looking like another dud.  Probably for the best.

Part 4: A Bear!

"Wait, what? Dude, I'm a bear.  Bears aren't horses, we don't eat hay."

Part 5: Links!

• Those teddy bears in space do not have proper space helmets.
• Squirrel!
• Different squirrel!
• Friendly bear!
• Ookla the Mok!
• Pen Ward as Pikachu! (Note that Pen got the stun gun.)
• Ross Douthat being an idiot!  "An imaginary Republican plot to ban contraception, the illusory threat that Mitt Romney would ban abortion in cases of rape, a wave of faux-chivalric outrage over Romney’s line about “binders full of women”[...] " Really, Ross? What news have you been watching?

Friday: Slightly less hot, slightly more productive

Statistics and text for paper: done.

Work project A: Testing, and probably working correctly.

Work project B: Problem fully identified, solution not quite as obvious.

So, all in all, not a bad day.  I'm probably going to be editing that paper over the weekend, which is totally a fun job.  My current thought is to head to the office to print off a paper copy, and then take it someplace to work on while eating.  Maybe the Kona Brewing place, to see if they've improved since last time.  This would then allow me to go to the theater that's there to watch the new Silent Hill movie in 2D, since 3D is stupid.

I apparently have few Silent Hill images saved.

And this one is slightly late.

This seems like a bad idea.

I think Peebles agrees.

• Porcupines can be cute too.
• Same with leopards.

Thursday: Infinite heat...am dying...send popsicles...

I really should buy more popsicles.  I'm tempted to make my own with juice, but I don't have any popsicle molds.  I guess I know what I'm buying this weekend.

I'm thinking I'm going to try the working from home thing again tomorrow, because I can't imagine it's going to be cooler or more comfortable in the office.

"Yeah, we're friends now. Whether you like it or not.  Friends forever."

• Just so I don't have to look it up again, this is where I'm voting.
• Does anyone care what Meatloaf thinks?
• I like pretty much everything Natasha does.
• This is kind of the definition of "bad day."

Wednesday: No links because today was boring, apparently

Between fighting a data set to make it give me some sort of reasonable results (which it finally did, although I'm going to have to note explicitly that low-resolution data sucks), and thrashing against code that still doesn't work, I didn't find anything interesting on the internet today.  Unfortunately, even working from home didn't increase my productivity as much as I'd hoped.  It was definitely cooler, but it's harder to multitask on a laptop screen and not on the giant monitors at the office.

I don't even have any good original pictures for today.

Today's bear picture is an alternate angle of this one.

I already posted this one,but I have a better caption:

"We're turbros, Ice King. Turbo bros. Turbros. Turbo bros."

Because tacos.

Tuesday: Work, A/C, continuing complaints

Even working from home in the late afternoon wasn't as productive as it should have been.  Part of the problem is that the office is fine until about 1-2PM.  Then the sun starts shining on my office, and the temperature just starts shooting up.  I think that if I don't get out of the heat before it gets too bad, my productivity stays depressed.  

My original parameterization was P = P0 / (T - T0), with T0 being about 70 degrees.  It was pointed out that this creates a singularity in the productivity curve.  So, let's go with a even polynomial instead, P = P0 * (T - T0)^2.  We now need to account for the time evolution, and that's almost certainly a decaying exponential.  So, let's say P = P0 * (T - T0)^2 * (1 + H(T - T_thresh) * exp(-k t )), where we use the Heaviside function to trigger this time evolution.  I'm not totally happy about this solution, as it really should be determined in a differential equation form.  Basically, the evolution is not cleanly in temperature or time only, and so I should have written the differential equations that explicitly do this.  I'm not going to do that now.

Math sleeps create punch sleeps.

I also discovered that a bug in some data comparison that was giving me like 100% errors is actually caused by my code being far better than the previous analysis and deblending things that weren't deblended before.  This means that things with flux A in the old analysis are now two things in the new analysis with flux A/2.  So I need to fix it in post, apparently.

"Hold still, I think I see a way out!"

• I really hope this dumbass doesn't get elected.
• Clark is kind of a jerk here.  It's the new continuity, though, so I think everyone is a jerk now.
• That's really obvious obstruction of justice.
• Dumbassery.

Monday: work - a/c = :(

I think I have to go in to get things done tomorrow, but I might change my mind in the morning.  It's just unbearable in there.  Not this:

"Wait...how did you get on the people side of the window?"

Completely not that.

This is not optional. 

Huh. Interesting.

I would like to see the Mythbusters do this.  Can you blow up a car, and then flip it on a catapult? My guess: Confirmed.

• “We also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of our military has changed,” the president said. “We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.”
• I <3 Eat Princess, too.
• When did McSweeney's start doing economics analysis?
• No. Apple in left hand, paring knife in right.  Make a thumbs up with your right hand, holding the knife with your fingers and the blade facing your thumb.  Start on the top of the apple, and make a small cut by holding your thumb on the apple, and then flex your fingers "closed" to draw the knife toward your thumb.  Repeat this while spinning the apple until the peel is removed.  I thought I'd found some citation that the way the brain controls hands makes this safer than forward cutting, but I can't find it now, and don't know enough neurology to prove it.  In any case, I've never cut myself doing this.
• That was a really long unnecessary rant.  Here's a squirrel.
• And Team Rocketmney.
• And this is technically a hexaflexagon.
• OMG.
• Tiny snow leopard Jesus.
• Best Teen Titans as Avengers.  I love disinterested Raven.

Because I had to know what was going on in that picture, and feel like sharing:

I transcribe the text as:

in piena forest indiana, no nomo aspetta il treno vicino alla linea ferroviaria. improvvisamente un boa assale il malcapitato, stringendolo nelie proprie spire potenti. Ma ecco una tigre slanciarsi a sua volta contro l'enorme rettile il quale avvolge, allora, anche la belva nella stretta mortale. Sui monstruoso groviglio sopraggiunge, frattanto. il treno.. il viluppo e spezzato sanguinosamente dalle ruote del convogilo.

Which my good friend google translates from Italian as:

Indian forest in full, no autonomous waiting for the train near the railway line. suddenly a boa attacking the victim, holding Nelie its powerful coils. But here's a tiger throw itself against the huge reptile which surrounds, then, even the beast in the stranglehold. The monstrous tangle occurs, meanwhile. the train .. the tangle broken and bloody from the wheels of the train.

Ok. So this means nothing, just that if you go to India to catch a train, you have such a high chance of being attacked by animals that it's not unusual for two to get you at the same time.  That time? The scheduled arrival time of the train.  India: Land of Synchronicity.

 

Sunday: I need to come up with a menu plan

No idea what to put on it, though.  I was thinking about getting pizza stuff and making a deep dish pizza like this in my cast iron pan.  Then I started looking at pizza posts and now I'm not sure if I just want to make pizza casserole, pizza bagels, panzanella, or maybe just a french bread pizza.

Or, I'll just get pizza for lunch tomorrow and short circuit the entire thing.

"Hey, what's going on over here?"

"Hey, what's going on over here?"

"Hey, what's going on over here?"

"Hey, panda, you're not a hat. You're a panda."

• I'm serious. It's like pizza was following me around all day.  When even the president is encouraging me to eat pizza, what can I do? He has an army.
• Randomly stumbled across this dungeons and dragons related thing.  The fact that you could pervert the intention of the rules to do things like this was always funny. Unless you were DM, and your players just came up with a solution to your "Vampire Endboss" that involves magically diverting the nearby waterfall base into his throne room.  I don't recall exactly how this was accomplished, and I also don't recall if I invented that spell doing 10d6 points of blade damage to everyone in the room who bleeds before or after this trick.  While I'm thinking, I will say that "throw the bags of flour from storage room A at the dark elves in storage room B, and then use the principle of a grain elevator explosion and a torch to clear the room" was actually a brilliant way to solve that problem.
• Here's a picture of a man fighting a tiger while a snake attempts to kill them both; meanwhile, they're fighting on the train tracks and a train is about to run them over.  I assume it represents the struggle of the workers.  Or something.
• I really hope that tomorrow's Adventure Time is happy, because a week of depressing stuff like this is really getting me down.
• Although, this helps.
• Spicy buffalo shrimp poboy with crumbled gorgonzola. That looks good too.

Saturday: Patty Melts

I really wanted a patty melt today, and after scanning some menus, ended up halfway across the island.

I seriously doubt that anyplace in history ever looked like this.

Farrells isn't that great, but they do have a properly designed patty melt.  Rye, American and Swiss cheeses, single patty, etc.  The onions weren't cooked as much as they should have been, and were kind of extra greasy.  Still, it mostly solved the patty melt issue, although I'm tempted to get groceries tomorrow and make my own again.

Not the best picture I could have taken.

Root beer float.  Made with warm root beer as far as I could tell.

So yeah.  Even though they were showing old black and white cartoons, I'm pretty sure I'm not going back.

"I really wish this grill would warm up so I could make dinner."

• No.
• Speaking of old cartoons, I should watch this.
• I once tried to see how much it would cost to fly to Easter Island, after reading some news article.  Doing that again shows that it's much more reasonable, costing only $1600.  The current flights are also only like 36 hours long, going HNL-LAX-MEX-SCL-IPC.  The previous ones connected through Miami instead of Mexico City.

Friday: Four parts

Part 1: Actual pictures I can now say I've used in a proper scientific talk.

Part 2: Dinner.

I wasn't sure what I wanted for dinner, so I came up with the idea to eat the other half of the loaf of tasty bread I had last night with some meats and cheeses.  The bread was a wheat/grain/fruit type, which was very  good.  I baked it in the oven for a bit too long, but fixed it with some butter and honey.  Grapes, because then I can claim it's healthy.  Some parmesan and gouda, because cheese is yummy.  Finally, I wanted some cured meat, and was indecisive at the deli counter.  So, instead of choosing, I went with the option "Three Hams," and got speck, prosciutto, and serrano ham.  It took the two deli people like twenty minutes to do this, and in the process cut slices of roast beef I didn't want (but accepted, since it was already sliced and only $1)

Part 3: Pictures of animals with captions.

There's no need to be jerks, dogs.

"Um...can I has cheeseburger, too?  Or, like, a bunch of them?"

I'm guessing the Queen has been doing something wrong here.

Part 4: Links.

• Squirrel!
• I hate left lane exits.
• Totoro!
• Squirrel! Cookies!

Thursday: The worst way to wake up

Is violently coughing when you didn't know you were sick.  After spending the morning sleeping instead of going to work, my throat didn't feel quite like fire anymore, so I was able to go in and be productive.  Woo.

I wanted soup for lunch today, since sore throat + soup = less sore throat.  Grylt had this "Mediterranean Soup."  Tomato base, pureed roasted red peppers (I'm guessing), mirepoix, mushrooms (I think?), and beef chunks.  The spicy of the peppers was kind of nice to fight the sore throat.  I kind of wish they had a "big bowl of soup and just the baby baguette" option there.  Maybe toast the bread a bit and put some butter on it?  That'd be tasty.

Come on, get with the program, Clefairy.  You're never going to get to the moon like that.

"Hello!"

I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to eat bunny ears, cat.

• I'm not sure about the luau, but laulau is delicious.  Still, some people are douchebags.
• Adventure Time is better than everything else on TV.
• This pun is brilliant. I am saddened that I did not come up with it.

Wednesday: sigh

I spent pretty much all day working on a talk.  And running a simulation. Twice, it turns out, because I had a typo in it the first time.  Plus I finally got a stupid program I've been working on for two weeks to complete without segfaulting or having to be kicked seven times.

And now I have a headache.  I'm beginning to think I hate days that end in y.

"Hey! This is my tree!"

Pandas.  Still fighting their perpetual nemesis, gravity.

I like you, Ice King.

• You're an idiot, Cupid.
• You're an idiot, Tagg Romney. Tagg?  Your name is Tagg?  Really?  Who the fuck comes up with these shitty names?
• That's a big sushi.