Sunday: Actually productive

Mostly in the "cleaning shit up" category.  Laundry, trash, vacuuming, plus I determined that yes, the scrubby brush thingy that I bought last week does make cleaning up the volcanic dust build up on my kitchen floor far easier than the swiffer does.

I also sat down to think about how difficult it would be to write something to generate character relationship maps from text excerpts.  The issue being that a lot of these Lovecraft stories I'm reading over have references to other characters in other stories, but manually graphing those relationships would take a long time.  One frustration with this is that Lovecraft tends to capitalize words excessively, so the simple method of identifying names by grouping strings of capitalized words isn't super effective.  I'm also running into the stop word problem, so I think I need some stronger algorithms.  My first thought is to use some sort of tree grouping, such that "H. P. Lovecraft", "Howard Phillips Lovecraft", "H. Phillips Lovecraft", and "Howard P. Lovecraft" would all be branches from the tree "Lovecraft".  This would clean up stop words, as they'd end up as trees with no branches.  The downfall is that names like "Cthulhu" would also be in that list, so it's possible I need to do something statistical.  The thought here is that names like "Cthulhu" are only ever found capitalized.  Initial words in sentences also show up as lower case forms, so "He was eaten by the Cthulhu he summoned." would have a uniqueness of 1.0 for "Cthulhu", but only 0.5 for "He".

Guess what finally showed up in Hawaii?

Sriracha flavor too, but who cares about that.

I looked all over for these special chips when they had the contest, but they never were available.  I can't tell if this is a special "sorry for forgetting you, Hawaii" edition or not, since this doesn't have the "vote" badge that the google image search suggests is common.  I haven't opened them yet, since I have two other bags of chips already open for lunches, and didn't think a third one was a good idea.

• I mean, this is dated from fricking May.
• You know what I took away from this article?  Sgt. Glenn French is afraid all the time when he's on the job.  Perhaps that means he shouldn't be doing that job.  I'm pretty sure one tiny sage sage would agree.
• This has been my long-time counter to any "China's taking over the world" fear mongering.
• Remember how we did Libya?  That should be the goal here.  If people want someone to intervene, that someone needs to be a large coalition.  And a proper coalition, not that bullshit Bush tried to pull.  It's not our job to police the world, especially when other large countries are overtly supporting the other side.  If they can't be shamed into doing something humanitarian, why not suggest sanctions?
• I am a big fan of repurposing cards for a specific event for a competely different one.  If you doubt that, ask the people who have gotten "Happy Hanukkah" cards, despite not being at all Jewish.
• I bought one of these.  Not bad.  I'm not sure they've really introduced too much variation in the Braeburn source, but it was on the sweet side of the apple spectrum.  I'm also not sure what the point of their apple lady.  Is she supposed to be Eve?