Wednesday: Fucking chi^2 contours

Hopefully ^ is a valid character in titles.

I have 99% of the problem resolved, but it bothers me that I can't get the last bit to work out.  I'm sure that there's still an issue.  I just spent an hour working on it instead of finishing that last sentence, and it's still not totally clear.  I'm beginning to suspect two causes.  One, my Levenberg-Marquardt step may be going wonky.  I'm thinking that maybe saturating lambda may be the right solution, but I'd like to have a better handle than "that's too big."  Second, I seem to be using a delta chi^2 threshold as my stopping criterion, and that may be too lazy.  Delta(parameter vector) is probably a stronger method, or even just taking the norm of the update vector.  Both of these boil down to "I think it's getting lazy at fitting," which isn't good.  Part of the problem is that the aforementioned "fucking chi^2 contours" basically form a hyperbolic trough in parameter space.  Maybe it'd be best to fit for inverse Y to eliminate that issue?

• A few days ago, I mentioned "The Man's Tomorrow," which apparently was confusing.  This is basically the point I was trying to make.  
• Cats are jerks.
• "Food sticks." Holy fuck, that's a terrible idea.
• Long space article I wanted to read, but now my head hurts, so I'll put it here and read it tomorrow.

Tuesday: Nope

"Give me all your money!"

• Bears and Wolves are Friends.
• I miss pizza.
• Monkeys and Blind Guys are Friends.
• Chespin is still the one I like best.
• This is kind of a poor discussion of the problem.  Hawaii has a homeless problem.  Housing is super expensive, and building new low-cost housing is rather hard to do when most of the accessible land already has something built on it.  Also, the idea that "tax credits for the working poor" would solve the problem is stunningly stupid.  

Monday: This is the least dramatic storm ever

Seriously, it looks like it's going to get to Oahu, and then completely fall apart.  I don't even think it's raining here anymore.  What a ripoff.

Tl;dr;L:

• Title:  The Rats in the Walls
• Date:  1923
• Summary:  Guy moves back to England to rebuild his ancestral home that has fallen into ruin.  His last ancestor to live there killed the rest of the family and fled to America.  Upon returning, he hears rats shuffling around, a sound he's eventually able to trace down to a secret cave under the manor.  He gathers associates to investigate, but due to magical genetic insanity, accidentally the Captain Norrys.
• Last line in italics?  No.
• Writer writes instead of fleeing?  No.
• Rating:  6/10.  The description is good, but the end is just too clunky.  I also have trouble with the fact that just being in this place makes him crazy like his ancestors, when it's clearly established that the ancestors were fairly recent inhabitants of the place. 
• Read it:  Here.
• Wikipedia:  

I woke up too early today.

• For later reference: the makeup that's now visible in the remastered Star Trek.
• This person forgot: a large number of people are kind of bastards, so you have to make sure you work with a good group.  FYI: I work with a good group.
• I kind of want to make this.
• Not a squirrel.
• Huh.  That's kind of a crappy move.  I guess setting up something and then being surprised when it's popular is kind of short sighted.
• Because that guy's company is "Bespoke Pixels," which immediately made me think of "Bespoke Fucks."  Not at all safe for work.

Sunday: For not doing anything today, this post is going to be rather full

1. Waking up early.

Generally, I hate waking up early.  However, my phone randomly decided it was in "make noise for email" mode, so I was able to wake up and look at it.  The email? "I am happy to let you know that your above paper, is now accepted for publication".  Finally.  The only thing left to do is to get it up on astro-ph.  I don't think it'll happen before Wednesday, as I'm probably going to miss the cut off for first post tomorrow (since I need to figure out both my astro-ph login information as well as when the cut off time is in HST).

2. Sushi.

Genki at Ala Moana had a big renovation, so I decided to stop by and see what that meant.  Here's the series of photos from that.

It's unreasonably busy, so you have to get a reservation number.

You also get a fan.  Because...you have to wait outside in the heat, I guess?

This was issue number one.  They've redesigned the inside, but seem to have fewer seats than before.  They've also set up the counter with groups of two in mind.  This means each touch pad (see later) serves two seats, so they're somewhat shitty about seating one.  Note I was number 85.  When they called number 90, I asked what was going on, and was told that I couldn't sit at a table, so I had to wait for the counter, which I'm pretty sure was bullshit, as they sat other groups at the counter during that time.  So, that was strike one.

Unagi and a tempura roll.

 Strike two: That unagi is on a $3.95 grey plate.  That's a dollar more than the $2.95 it is on the red plates at Kurukuru.  Secondly, this was kind of crappy unagi.

Garlic salmon.  Nope.  This was a mistake.

The whole point of the renovation: the express lanes.  I waited for the belt to go around a few times so I could make sure I was ordering something that wasn't found there.  Here's the tamago.  You can order up to four things at once, for obvious reasons.

A shot down the track.  You can see the two express tracks (next to the town scenes), and the array of touch panels.

Ebi fry.  This came on track two, with the "racecar" train. 

But although it was hot, the panko was really uneven.

Strike three: the ahi on the belt looked terrible.  Pale, uneven slices, didn't have any.

So everything is basically a dollar more than at Kurukuru, there's a lot of unnecessary technology, the line is too long, there are twice as many workers as are really necessary, and overall it doesn't taste as good.

I guess that solves the question of which sushi place deserves my money.

3. Tl;dr Lovecraft.

• Title:  Pickman's Model
• Date:  1926
• Summary:  Pickman is an artist that makes paintings of ghouls in Boston.  Read the title again, and now guess the twist ending.
• Last line in italics?  Yes.
• Writer writes instead of fleeing?  No.
• Name checks a friend? Clark Aston Smith.
• Rating:  8/10.  Sure, you can see the ending coming from like paragraph 4, but it's still enjoyable.  This has a lot of over-detailed descriptions of things, but that really adds to the horror he's trying to describe in the paintings.
• Read it:  Here.
• Wikipedia:  

4. Flossie.

It looks like it will actually be a tropical storm when it hits.  Here are pictures:

So maybe I'll leave work a bit early tomorrow.

The news had a comment today that Hawaii isn't usually hit by hurricanes or tropical storms.  This picture shows the reason.

That reason is the following complicated series of facts.

• West coasts of continents always have cold currents.  Due to the Coriolis effect, in the northern hemisphere, currents are clockwise, and counterclockwise in the southern.
• Hurricanes in the eastern Pacific form in the hot water off the coast of Mexico.
• In order to get to Hawaii, those hurricanes have to cross the cool water cycling off the coast of California.
• Cool water saps the power from the hurricane, so Hawaii usually just gets the remnants.

5. Links.

• Kitchen #1 has a baby prison built in.
• I think the problem is that you have to keep the tie perfectly flat.
• DIAF, WSJ.
• Flossie link.

Saturday: Fixed that bug

It turns out if you blindly read a header value that doesn't exist, and then pretend with all your heart that it does exist, the probability of segfaulting is pretty good.  Oh well.  I think tomorrow I'm going to actually sit down, diagram the code, figure out where things should be, attempt to make a lot of redundant code assigned in a single place, and make it somewhat usable to people who haven't spent three years developing it.

I also got ramen for dunch, which was tasty and a good idea.

Let's see if I have pictures...

That works.

I decided today to reread my Lovecraft books, so I'm going to share that with "TL;DR Lovecraft"

• Title:  In the Vault
• Date:  1925
• Summary:  Asshole alcoholic undertaker totally gets what's coming to him.
• Last line in italics?  Yes.
• Writer writes instead of fleeing?  No.
• Rating:  2/10.  It's just not that interesting.
• Read it:  Here.
• Wikipedia

I guess I can't put the links here without intervening text, or it gets gobbled up.

• This cat totally got Cthulhu-ed.  Sidenote: Cthulhu is in chrome's dictionary, but "sidenote" isn't.
• BMO.
• What?

Friday: Fucking integers, am I right?

Short version: libc "abs" function returns the integer absolute value of the integer argument.  This is fundamentally useless, as if you're taking an absolute value, you're probably working with floating point numbers, as those are the ones you use for "actual fucking math."

Long version: approximation A isn't very good, and I've been truncating it at y = 1.0 because it's garbage beyond that.  This week has led me to the conclusion that the garbage point is actually closer to y = 0.7 (potentially y = sqrt(0.5), but that's not important here).  Therefore, to deal with values of y > 1.0, I needed to find a different approximation.  I've been playing with approximation B for the past week or so, but it kept having a strange quantization error at high values of x.  I found approximation C, which uses ~30 order polynomials in x and y, and so should be pretty decent.  Nope.  Exact same quantization issue (plus there must be a typo in region 2, as that just falls apart).  So, it seemed like the only solution was to find midpoints of each quantized region, interpolate along them, and define the function that way.  That led to hunting down the midpoints.  It turns out that each midpoint was located at y = sqrt(0.5) + 0.5 * sqrt(0.5).  Huh.  That's basically the definition of "mathematically suspicious."  Does approximation B use sqrt(0.5) anywhere?  No.  So where does it come from?

Way up top, I define y = abs(z * s / sqrt(2)).  And because that's abs and not fabs, it quantizes the values of y in steps of 1/sqrt(2) = sqrt(0.5).  Fucking fuck fuck.

This seems like an appropriate place to put this largely unrelated note from my notebook:

It's still partially broken, as I only have a decently working implementation in the test code that I've been using to compare approximations A,B, and C (plus D,E,F,manual calculation, and mostly lies).

• Political stuff.
• Well, that's fucking bullshit.
• More stories need to point out that Congress is full of lying hypocritical shits.
• Because they totally are.
• I'm with Miyazaki on this one.  There is absolutely no threat of "invasion by neighboring countries."  This is probably a reference to the Senkaku Islands, but that doesn't really count as an invasion.
• Other stuff.
• Follow up on yesterday's plague squirrel link.  Don't go to New Mexico or Arizona.  There.  Done.  Problem solved.
• Have I posted this before?  Anyway, pandas are jerks.
• I'm pretty sure that this suggests strongly that the current grad school system is poorly designed.  My solution?  Increase funding for graduate students.  Money doesn't fix everything, but it can certainly help significantly.
• Flossie.  The first hurricane that may actually come close enough to rain on me here in Hawaii is named Flossie.  That sounds like a mascot for a dentist.

I wonder if they drew it going over Hawaii just to be dramatic.

Thursday: Yes, this gif is massive and takes forever to load.

But I don't care.  I enjoyed it.

I also decided today that a follow up to yesterday's math would be good.  It's basically yesterday's figure #2, just with more samples, showing that the real peak becomes dominant after the sixth iteration:

• I think DeLong gets group five wrong here.  Grad students in the sciences can't really be outsourced in any real fashion.  Sorry, economics (and other social sciences). You aren't a real science.
• I was going to post about the Machiavellian top-down antics of this "Groundswell" group.  However, reading the quotes, it sounds a lot more like somebody decided they needed to form a "cool kids club" to talk about all their great plans and ideas.
• I totally could have spelled that "kool kids klub" and that would have worked too.
• BTW: Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is kind of a horrible bitch.
• No, you shouldn't be worried.  Plague isn't something you can't deal with with a little bit of antibiotics.  It's not like it ever killed anyone.  Besides, that squirrel fucking looks like it has plague.  Don't play with diseased looking squirrels.  Happy squirrels make sine waves.  Plague squirrels limp along like they have the fucking plague.  This isn't rocket science.
• Rocket science.
• This is a brilliant plan.  Similar wonderful plans from my D&D days:
• Remember that there's a grain stockpile in the room down the hall.  Grab bag of flour and throw it into the room filled with evil elven archers that are currently monkey stomping the party through the narrow doorway.  Toss in torch to ignite the room.  Because flour explosions are an actual thing.
• Trapped in a house being attacked by worgs.  Cleric uses stone shape to cover the windows and doors in thick stone.  When morning arrived, party had to climb out the chimney to get out.

Wednesday: Blind ignorance and a pile of math

The problem is identifying the shift between two spectra.  My pile of math immediately shouts out "CROSS CORRELATION!" because that of course is the one true answer for such things.  However, maybe you don't believe me when I say that.  So, let's come up with a simulation using perl.

Imagine a spectrum extending from 1000 to 2000 with 100 randomly placed lines, with locations you know.  Use those line positions to make a series of Gaussians of identical amplitude and width.  This is the "real" spectrum.  Next, you have a "test" spectrum, that has 100 lines as well, but it probably doesn't have exact matches to the real spectrum.  In the simulation, this is defined as follows:  at iteration 0, the test spectrum is comprised of 100 new randomly placed lines.  After each iteration, a random test line is replaced with the known line from the real spectrum list.

For this test, the test spectrum was defined to have a shift of 11.5 units, and a search was performed over the range -100 to +100 using the same cross-correlation/binary-tree algorithm I implemented in the actual science code.  For each iteration and shift value, plot up the correlation coefficient:

Note that there's a ridge in the center that shifts from a peak around zero to a peak around 11 around iteration ~20.

This directly illustrates the power of the cross-correlation technique:  when there are no common lines (iteration = 0), the peaks are basically randomly located, and there isn't a very clear best value.  However, as more common lines are added, the random peaks lose power, and transfer that power to the peak centered on the best shift value.  Here's a slightly more clear picture showing iterations 0, 50, and 99:

The diagonal lines are an artifact of the binary tree search and me not bothering to sort the data file before plotting.

This nicely shows the improvement as the number of common lines increases.  The math shows why this has to be the case:

corr[shift] = sum_over_x(R(x) * T(x+shift))

If A and B are completely random, no value of shift should be any different than any other.  However, if there are common lines at R(x) and T(x+shift), then those values will reinforce, and the correlation is larger.  Even when the number of common lines is small, they still overwhelm the random effects.

• Chopped.
• I kind of want to play this game now.
• Kyle sent this link to me during the middle of the work day.  He's lucky I had lots of time compiling and testing code today, so I could look at bears on and off for like an hour.

Below the cut: bears!

Tuesday: 5776

That's how far image A and image B are shifted after running B through the program at work.  In the X direction, only.  You'd think that'd make it easier to track down, but that doesn't seem to be the case.  I'm now beginning to suspect that 5776 = \sum_{i

Edit ten minutes later: well, blogger ate my math, but it doesn't matter too much, because I think I've figured it out:  The overlap between i and j is 640 pixels, and the grid is 10x10.  Since you don't care about the last grid point, you only have 9 to deal with, and 9x640 = 5760, which is reasonably close to my measurement of 5776.  Yes, this looks suspiciously like arbitrary numerology to obtain the number I want, and no, it doesn't explain why this doesn't happen with Y.  In any case, it's at least something I can test out tomorrow.

"Why is this fucking river so damn wet?"

• Darrell Issa has millions of dollars he can use to pay someone to go collect his mail.  That's why he doesn't mind if the USPS stops delivering to regular people.  See also: every other service that the government provides that he thinks he could do better for himself with his own money (note everyone without money can go fuck themselves).
• That's a terrible idea.
• I'm pretty sure Steve Cohen is probably going to jail.

Thing I just realized

If I had a NEPTR, I would be able to have pie anytime I wanted.

Anytime.  Like right now.  Pie.  To eat and enjoy.

Like a coconut cream pie.  Or apple.  Cherry even.  Pie, for ever and ever.

Monday: Fuck you, Elsevier

1. You suck.
2. You lock up all your articles behind a pay wall, even if they're 30-odd years old.
3. When I crack the library proxy barrier to get to the journal, you don't even have an electronic copy available, so that "buy this article for $40" really means, "wait 4-6 weeks for us to print the pdf we keep hidden in a vault and mail that to you."
4. We live in the future now, so requesting the main university library pull the bound journal out of storage and send it to me is basically unheard of.  I did that once during my thesis, and it was such a rare occurrence that even some of the faculty were surprised I would use such an archaic means of reading a paper.  And that journal was originally published in Russian, Elsevier.  What's your excuse?

You brought a bear on a freaking boat.  I'm pretty sure the bear had already resolved that "these fuckers who put me on a boat must die."

• I really liked tonight's episode of Adventure Time.  Seeing where BMO came from was cool.
• I've seen this experiment done with marshmallows, but it's the same here.  The only trick is that you need to keep the food from rotating, so you have to take out the turntable.
• Since the Republicans are rather anti-democracy with their attempts to impair voter registration/voting, why not just do the same thing here?  Have the candidates nominated by a controllable state committee.  Then no one has to worry about having to face a primary challenger.

Sunday: Why won't you fucking work, you stupid function?

Switch from approximation 1 to approximation 4, attempt to make that work, discover that I still can't get things to work quite correctly.  I'm tempted to switch to approximation 99, and then just use numerical derivatives.  Fucking non-analytic functions.

However, before futzing with math I'm still not happy with, I went and got lunch.

And fries.  And onion straws.  Unfortunately, the onions were too greasy, so much so that I really couldn't eat many of them.  The fries were decent, though.

The burger.

The concept behind this burger was "double buffalo."  First, buffalo meat burger.  Second, blue cheese and wing sauce.  Finish with bacon (because bacon), sauteed onions (because burgers aren't slippery enough), mixed greens (to pretend it's healthy), and shredded carrot (which worked much better than I was expecting in the burger.  The goal for it was to simulate the carrots that soak up the sauce in the bottom of a bowl of wings).

Sliced.  Note this isn't even remotely close to the medium I ordered, but it was warm all the way through, so that wasn't a problem.

The verdict on this is somewhat mixed.  The sauce and cheese outweigh the meat flavor, so it probably could be made with regular beef instead.  This burger was a bit light on the cheese, which meant that individual bites were quite different.  I think that means this is likely done best at home, where I can ensure that the cheese/sauce/meat balance is more appropriate.  The veggies on the bottom worked fairly well, with the carrots adding a nice crunch.  The onions and bacon could probably be left off.  The onions just made it messy, and the bacon was thin, so there wasn't much of the smokey flavor I was hoping it would add.  Another point for making it at home, where that can be tuned much better.

• This blog post from yesterday was what prompted my burger-speriment.  I didn't go to Teddy's, as the meat quality at the Counter is a bit better.  HBC was another option, but I don't think they have the sauce.
• I originally found this picture elsewhere, but it was linked to a flickr account where the douche had claimed "all rights reserved."  DIAF, asshole.  Cropping a 70 year old advertisement doesn't give you any rights.
• Here.  Have some Team Rocket.  Weren't expecting that, were you?
• Oh, so Joss Whedon is responding directly to my accusations now?

Saturday: I bought really nice looking salmon today

I plan on eating it for dinner this week.  That's pretty much the most exciting thing that happened today.  There was the little girl at sushi today who ate three plates of tamago.  That's not entirely truthful.  She ate the egg part of the three plates of tamago, and then piled up the rice into a tiny wall.

I also saw this at the store, which seemed crazy:

Knock off Harry Potter "Butterbeer," I think.  I didn't buy it, because butterscotch soda sounds terrible.

• This sign.
• That's kind of horrible.  In the standard category, I thought art theft worked like this:  First, find someone rich who wants something unavailable.  Second, steal it.  Third, exchange item for money with pre-identified rich person.  Why would you steal something famous if you didn't have a buyer already lined up?  It's not like gold or diamonds, where it's hard to track back.  There is literally one copy of that painting.  People are going to know it was stolen.
• I've saved this, and will use it next time there are computer problems that I need to discuss.
• Tiger meets dolphins.
• This seems like a bad idea.  My understanding was that most people didn't like the new Superman movie.  Why let them ruin Batman, too?
• This also seems like a bad idea.  Loki was set up as a villain for Avengers by his appearance in Thor.  Adding Thanos at the end didn't complicate that, since people can understand "bad guy boss controlling visible bad guy."  Using Ultron as the next villain is going to be complicated.  He's a robot guy, who was built by another Avenger (that wasn't in the first movie, so he needs to be introduced, too), who is taking over the world for like the 99th attempt.  That's not so simple to explain.

Friday: Me + cross-correlation = less-than-three-symbol

Edit: interesting to note that you can't use < in the title of a post.

Mainly because it's just a super useful technique that can be used to solve problems.  Plus, it's wonderful at rejecting bad values.  Since the bad value isn't going to reinforce anywhere, it has a negligible effect on the final answer.  This makes it great for certain matching problems where values in set A may not be in set B.  If they are there, then you see that, but if they're not, then they don't really penalize things.

Obligatory picture:

"Go ahead, jerk.  Golf.  I fucking dare you."

• Don't go to Dubai.
• Egypt.
• Animals with popsicles.
• Prostitutes and planets.
• If Detroit loses the art collection, I will never return there.

Thursday: Today has been a good news/bad news kind of day

Good news: my "oh, that just works like so, and then you do a cross-correlation.  Easy-peasy" was correct.

Bad news: the implementation breaks 99 other things in the program.

Good news: there's a seminar tomorrow morning that I kind of want to attend.

Bad news: it's basically at the same time as a doctor's appointment.

Good news: I was able to restart a processing job at work.

Bad news: but the processing cycles are being gobbled up by other things.

Good news: my apartment building is help up with lots and lots of rebar.

Bad news: you probably aren't supposed to see it:

The painters are also structural engineers, apparently, as they're going over and resurfacing areas of the building that need to be repaired.

• Why the economy is still crappy.  
• Squirrel!
• “There’s a pagan sexuality which is a pan-sexuality which is the erotic. Abortion, homosexuality, infidelity, pornography, euthanasia, infanticide all of those things were just the common sexual practice of pagan Rome and Christians were not for being very different. Monogamous, faithful, struggling, etc…you know the chastity, purity.”  Seriously, would it kill these fuckers to read a god damned book once in a fucking while?  Specifically, the fucking Lex Julia.  You know, the law Augustus used to send his own daughter into exile for adultery?

Wednesday: It is not Tuesday.

I had that confused for a large chunk of the day.

It turns out that I need to sit down this weekend, and do some serious clean-up on the code for the paper that's back with the referee.  Nothing is really wrong with it, but a reorganization and splitting functions into sane components would help with maintainability.  It's still reasonably clear, as I was able to prototype and implement a new element today without any major issue, but it's somewhat close to a tipping point of mess.

As a sidenote, I need to clean up the command line options too, especially since I just now realized how the "flag" option in the long_options struct works.  Go me for being great at reading documentation.

Unrelated point: Grapes plus more grapes totally equals a salad.  It went well with pizza.

You...you're just the worst spy ever, aren't you, Comrade Brown Suit? First thing off the train, and you're blabbing your plans from Moscow?  Fucking amateur hour. 

• I really would like to know how the story ends.
• Thanks, Obama.
• I have no third link, so here's the getopt long example that I also have open.

Tuesday: Chain rule

It turns out that given f(x,y), if y = y(x), then df/dx != ∂f/∂x.  I have a solution that looks like it should be correct, but it doesn't seem to work quite right.  This suggests I probably should look at numerical derivatives, and compare those with the analytic ones.

I was able to prove that a four term Fourier expansion of the function is effectively equivalent to the five term polynomial + special function expansion I've been using.  Always a nice thing to see.  The Fourier expansion is probably faster, as I suspect sine and cosine are probably well optimized (and are apparently part of the processor instruction set).

All this math has made me hungry.  For pizza.  That looks like a frozen pizza, too.  I could get a frozen pizza tomorrow, and eat it for dinner.  Not like the whole thing.  I've not done enough math for that much pizza.  Just a slice or two, with something healthy to make it a proper meal.  I have a big tub of grapes that would probably go well.  Maybe get some lettuce and do a salad?  Can you put grapes in a salad?

• A) Most people don't even know who a lot of these characters are.  B) Come on, Skeets was dead for like one damn issue, and that was in the middle of an extra-dimensional/time-travelling thing.  Plus, he's a robot.  That can't possibly count. C) If I it were possible, I'd vote to have Jason Todd killed by the Joker with a crowbar.  Again.
• This is kind of a brilliant idea.
• I fucking hate brutalist architecture.
• Read this, and tell me if this doesn't sound like the scammiest scam that ever scammed a sca-dollar.  Apparently she's friends with Jenny McCarthy, so now you're nodding your head saying, "yeah, I can fucking see that.  Fuckers."  Yep.

Monday: I'm just going to post squirrel pictures and then the links. My head hurts.

"Noms!"

"I'm a hat!"

"Zzzzz..."

• No fucking duh.
• Mine was apparently 145 pages long, so it fell slightly higher than the "physics" 75% quartile.  Also note that as the "bullshit" level of the subject increases, so does the thesis length.
• a) How did I not know that they were related? b) I'm interested in hearing more of this album.

Sunday: Sushi and piles of youtube videos

After yesterday, I had to go get sushi.

Wasabi still travels in packs.

Fishies!

Unagi is gone, but the futomaki is still here.

So, that futomaki.  There is no way to eat it without looking like an idiot.  It's giant, and the nori doesn't completely enclose it.  They basically exploded all over when I took a bite.

The youtube videos are under the cut.

• Bunado.
• Baby red pandas.

Saturday: Lazy day

Still, I'm considering it a successful day.  I probably should have gone to get sushi today, but by the time I was ready to leave, it was actual dinner time.  I didn't want to wait for food, so I'll go tomorrow.  I think I need to get some groceries anyway.

Refraction.  Also an oil rig, if I'm not mistaken.

The reason sushi would have been good today is that I ended up watching KIKU TV's showing of Cocorico (I think), which had part 3 (I think) of a multipart series about sushi.  Cocorico is a Japanese (this I know) variety show (I think) where they have a big panel, and they talk about things, and then send people out to do wacky things, with the big panel commenting back at the studio, with the people who did the challenge, so the studio stuff must happen later.

Anyway, the challenge this week was "Can these guys eat everything on the menu at a popular sushi restaurant?"  Last week I caught the end of the "these girls" attempt, and I think the answer there was "yes."  The team this week made it through dish #66 (I think), out of the ~110 to cover.  

They were eating at Kura sushi, which has an interesting plate return system.  After eating five plates, you can slide the plates into a plate shaped opening beneath the sushi belt, and that starts a game of chance, in which you can win a capsule toy.  I think it also counts the plates and sends them back to be washed.  Neat idea.  Because of this game, there's a song about it, by Morning Musume (a Jpop group composed of an infinite number of female singers that are often broken into smaller groups, as transporting an infinite number of singers is a logistics nightmare.  No, seriously, look at this.  WTF, Japan?).

In conclusion, Japanese variety games are wonderful, because they take simple concepts (eat all the sushi), and make it entertaining.

One more thing that I just remembered: a similar show (maybe the same?) had a challenge of "can your children (aged 7 and 5) navigate the Japanese train system to meet you at the amusement park?"  This was interesting as in the US, the answer would have been "No, they'll be murdered by hobos.  Plus, you're going to jail for blatant child endangerment."  In Japan, the answer was "Sure, that'll be fine.  Business Man will help them buy their tickets, and Train Guy will ensure they get off at the right stops.  However, they'll walk the wrong way leaving the station, so they won't make it in time to win the challenge."

• The capsules had pins and stickers with these characters on them.  Note this is "chapter 1."  The link up top shows you there are eleven other.  My favorite of the ones obtained in the episode is A12 "サー モンキー" => "salmonkey".  It is a monkey with salmon for his face and butt.  I kind of want to translate the other names.  I'm trying to figure out what A14, the squirrel is.  "イナ リス" is "INARISU"/"INA-squirrel".  I'm unclear what that has to do with the letters.  Maybe it's a pun on inari sushi, which has little fried tofu pouches?  They could look like envelopes, so maybe that's the joke?
• Final sushi thing for today: You can buy a toy kaiten sushi.  It's super expensive, but it comes with lots of tiny sushi pieces.
• This could potentially be a sushi thing, but instead, it's a Godzilla thing.  What I learned from this post: a) there's a new Godzilla movie coming. b) it's partially filmed in Honolulu.
• This is dumb.  Was military law invented by absolute morons?
• Finally, sloths.

Friday: Science!

Good science thing number 1: I finally got the paper revisions resubmitted, so everyone can relax a bit until they come back and start asking for the money to publish the damn thing.  I should probably start thinking about doing some new project, too.  I'm thinking something data-miney, machine-learny.

Good science thing number 2: I finally launched the reprocessing for the science I actually get money for, and it seems to be running about twice as fast as the original processing.  This is good news, as it means that we'll actually be able to complete it in a reasonable amount of time.  I think we may be able to sneak it in under the deadlines we have for it, so that's good.

I don't have anything else in the queue, so let's go with the somewhat creepy gif of Lain.

• Long form items for the weekend.
• Omni was always a magazine I thought I wanted to read when I was a kid.  I think that was partially because the covers' crazy 80's sci-fi art.
• On the one hand, I like hamsters.  On the other hand, I do not like cancer and tuberculosis.  The comments are a bit harsh, but I thought the bulk of the article was fairly interesting, covering a lot of points that the commercials tend to gloss over.
• Delicious looking foods.
• Like this taco.
• And this pie...brownie...thing.
• Remainders.
• Pokemon Not Snap.
• Why exactly do people claim that CEOs deserve high pay?  I think most people would see that these are terrible ideas.

Thursday: That's two hours I won't get back

"No, Mr. Cat. Because you see, I haz cheezburger."

• I believe this is now my favorite image macro meme.
• Bee and Puppycat!  I can't wait to watch the first episode!
• I wish I could wear a panda hat and help pandas all day.
• Shit.  Today was 7-11, and I didn't go get a slurpee.  Maybe I'll go buy one tomorrow.
• This is absolute bullshit.  Dear Alabama, this is a blinking sign illustrating why you have failed as a society.

Wednesday: Abuse of computational resources

Largely because I took two pictures, stitched them together, then perspective corrected the result so it looks like a face on shot.  It would probably have been easier to properly frame a single image, but I knew I could fix it in post, so I didn't see any reason to do so.  All so I could do one joke.  The black is where the mosaic didn't have data, and the white region is where the perspective corrected version didn't have data.

"I swear to Bear-God, Rocky, if you don't stop playing that stupid song!"

• Squirrels!
• I also feel bad for derpy-eye Piplup.
• Ok, I kind of like this mid-century modern room, although that staircase railing is still trying to kill people.
• This is why I'm glad I don't read comics anymore.  What. The. Fuck.
• This is something I'm sad I missed.  This is how comics can be done well.  

Tuesday: It turns out inverting a matrix with a NAN value in it isn't going to work

I've fixed that, but it required a lot more checks than I expected.

"I'm going to need exact change only."

• I would love to see this guy come to AAS.
• I had already planned to not see this movie.  I'm still surprised that famous assholes get unhappy when being an asshole starts to hurt them financially.
• Yet another reason we should have the government spend lots of money on useful things.  Like science and technology.
• I saw this, which reminded me of this news story about the Ala Moana Genki Sushi.  I wonder if the redesign is going to be like that.  I may have to change up my sushi plans in the near future.

Monday: stupid trade winds

The humidity is crazy high, and the wind is completely still.  I am not happy with this state of affairs.  Because of the heat, here are three random screencaps from the episode of Teen Titans Go I watched on my DVR today, presented with minimal commentary.

Someone got chomped.

Trigon-enhanced "popular Earth girl" Starfire.

The actual thing I wanted a picture of.  Food Bear.  "Scary savings!"  I would totally shop at a place named "Food Bear." Honestly, I think I'd shop at any place that was simply "Noun Bear."  Gas Bear.  Clothes Bear.  Medicine Bear.  Electronics Bear.  Sushi Bear.  "Where our prices maul the competition. In their stupid ugly faces."  This would be the easiest marketing campaign ever.

• I'm not saying that the Food Bear looks like Bobby, but it's kind of close.  Maybe a bit too close.
• Toronto flooded today.  The Internet responded in the only way it knows how: a tumblr filled with macro images.
• Blah blah infrastructure, blah blah lowest interest rates in forevers, blah blah Republican blind obstructionism fucking up good plans.
• This actually made me laugh.  On the flip side of "we're going to pass lots of pro gun laws" is the insurance industry saying, "slow down there, Captain Shooty.  Do you want to know what your premiums are going to be in New Dodge City?"

Sunday: summer break is ending

Or, at least the four-day weekend grown-up equivalent to summer break.  It's summer, I'm on break, summer break.  In related news, absolutely nothing happened today online or off, so it's random pictures plus three shitty links.  Not so much that links are shitty, just that the links go to stories that involve people who suck at life.  Horrible shitty people who probably should just die, and save everyone the trouble of having to put up with their horrible shitty shittiness.

This should probably wait until a sushi day, but it's cute and funny.  Sailor Shiba Inu isn't terribly helpful.

"I am the answer to that one joke."

• Congressional Republicans are assholes, and are willing to ruin the country because they hate poor people.  No, seriously.  They can't cut anything else, but they have to cut things, so therefore they must cut programs that help poor people.  And old people.  And people who are sick.  Absolute fucking assholes.
• Cops are assholes.  This also covers the "why are they always shooting dogs" question.  The suggested answer is "because they can without getting in trouble, and some of them are basically psychopaths that enjoy the feeling of power they get in killing something."  Absolute fucking assholes.
• Charles Saatchi is an asshole.  He's all "oh, I have to divorce Nigella because she didn't defend me in the press, and tell everyone how much of a great guy I am.  I mean, it's not like I was photographed with my hands on her neck while she was crying.  How is that not like the best thing a person can do?  A little more fake strangulation would certainly decrease the number of tears in the world.  Right?"  Absolute fucking asshole.

Saturday: I may have given the middle finger to two families of four today.

In my defense, they were both in cars driven by absolute assholes.  This intersection is really bad with people who don't know how to drive.  Here's the sequence of events that leads to all the problems:

1. Piikoi goes down to the shore, and so it accumulates a lot of traffic as it goes north.  Traffic from Ala Moana and Waikiki both use it as a main way to get on to H-1 West.  As shown on this table, there aren't many easily accessed westbound entrances to the east, so everyone takes Piikoi up to the Lunalilo entrance.
2. From the google map picture, you can see that there are four Piikoi lanes that continue past Kinau.  However, the leftmost (P-1) is useless, as it is designed to take you to the post office or back down Pensacola. The rightmost (P-4) takes you to the H-1 East entrance.  This leaves the other two for traffic that wants to get on H-1W.  The second left (P-2) is the correct lane, and the third (P-3)continues up Piikoi past H-1, but before that, it splits into two new lanes, one of which also goes down Lunalilo.  However, it is not the lane to be in if you want the highway, although people force their way in anyway.
3. The lights are all fucked up.  There is no synchronization at all, so if the Lunalilo light is green, odds are good the Kinau light is going to be red for that entire time, preventing any sort of flow to happen.  This leads people to try anything to make it through any given light, as otherwise they may be forced to wait until the next cycle.  Note that lights being all fucked up is not limited to Piikoi.  Pensacola has its own issues with this.
4. People don't know how to pull up to maximize the utility of each lane.  Half to full car length gaps are astonishingly common.

This leads to me, sitting on Kinau, trying to turn left onto Piikoi so I could take H-1E.  Note that that shouldn't be too hard: there's nothing blocking that entrance, so once through the Kinau light, I can pull on directly (the Kinau H-1E onramp will be a topic for a future "why does Honolulu have such fucked up roads?").

I wait a cycle, after which I'm number 3 in the second left turn lane on Kinau (no one uses the first left, K-1, as that goes to the post office).  The light turns green, but because the light at Lunalilo is red still, no one can really move.  One car makes it past to continue up Piikoi (P-3), leaving the next to turn into P-2 and stop with half a car length in front, effectively blocking K-2 from being used for either turning left or continuing straight.  Because of this (and that guy's hesitation), I'm left sitting in the crosswalk when the light turns red, forcing me to apologize to the pedestrians who now have to walk around me.  So, asshole in the black SUV gets the finger (along with his stupid family).

The Lunalilo light turns green a few seconds later, allowing that section of road to clear out.  However, it turns back to red before the Kinau light changes for Piikoi, so it again backs up.  P-2 is now backed up to the curb (there's no crosswalk on that side), and the Kinau light starts to turn to yellow.  I assume I'm perfectly clear because I can just go around when it switches to red (green for me).  However, the next jackass takes that yellow light as a signal to be a complete fuckface, and dashes up as his light turns red, again blocking K-2.  I honk at him, but, due to the significant fucktardary in his head, he looks backwards to see what's going on.  This was unfortunate, as it means he completely missed me flipping him off.

Lunalilo turns green again, allowing this dumbass to finally pull out of Kinau, letting me actually get into P-4 so I can merge onto H1.  It was as I was pulling past him (with finger firmly extended) that I was able to see that this jackass also had a family.  Your dad is a moron, kids.  Sorry about that.

Anyway, then I had sushi, and things were better:

I'd already had a bunch, but wanted something cooked.  I knew that would take a while, so I got miso soup to have while the cooked thing was cooked.

The cooked thing: garlic ahi.

• That intersection is also number 2 on this accident list.  Beretania and Piikoi is three, but that's gotten significantly better since they reworked it last year (new dedicated right turn from Beretania to Piikoi; much clearer traffic lights; I think they've adjusted the timings a bit, too).
• I like this clock.
• Crabs Adjust Humidity.  I think this is now the fourth Cards Against Humanity expansion I kind of want to get.
• A comic about Catwoman.