Friday: Ugh.

It's still stupid humid.

Also, the basketball thing started and I didn't run my analysis.  Maybe I'll do it tomorrow and see how well it does this year.

• This show is just dragging on and feels extra bad compared to the CW superhero shows.
• Squirrels.

Wednesday: Seriously, the fucking tropics suck.

All "let's be fucking hot every damn day" and "also super humid. Let's get on that" and "you know what?  Let's have the wind come from the fucking south, bringing even more of all of that!  Wooo!"  Fuck you, the tropics.  Fuck you in your stupid fucking face.

"You can come join us if you want!"

You know what, Friendly Polar Bears, I think I might take you up on that.

• I didn't read this, but it had a nice title, so I saved it in a tab, and now I'm too hot and lazy to read it and see if it's interesting.
• Given that cheapest condo currently for sale is listed at $889k, and they're putting in a fucking luxury car dealership at ground level, I think the correct choice for the development authority is "too fucking bad, replace all your damn windows and be compliant."  Fucking jackasses.  "Oh, we're trying to be environmentally friendly, and to do that, we just need to redistribute all the sunlight to everyone else."
• There is no third link.

The news just explained why it's so hot out.

See, things won't cool off until January or February, so we'll just have to deal with those extra seven degrees.

Tuesday: And then the entire state went batshit crazy.

I left work tonight, and decided to stop off and pick up take out grocery sushi for dinner because I didn't feel like getting groceries last weekend since I'm leaving.  Unfortunately, the first store I went to had no parking, and people had completely blocked all the lanes, so even if people wanted to leave, they couldn't.  Second store?  Same thing, just with more crazy.

The end result is that I drove all the way back to work, because I can park at work and walk to the store.

The problem?  Everyone is treating Iselle like it's the end of the damn world.  Safeway had zero water.  No water.  All the water?  Gone.  There is no more water to buy.  The soup section?  Half empty.  Gross ass canned tuna?  Same thing.  Do people not buy anything until there's a storm coming?  I pretty much always have soup and a case of water.  It's just a regular thing to have around.  When I run lowish, I get more.  That way, I don't have to clog up all the damn stores and attempt to destroy the normal logistics systems that deliver everything.

Plus, it's not getting to Oahu until Friday at the earliest, it's being shredded by the standard trade winds, and the current forecast has it passing over the Big Island before getting here.  The Big Island, where we keep all the giant mountains.  Hilo has some justification in panicking, but by the time it gets here, it's not going to be a super disaster.

My biggest concern at this point is that my flight on Thursday doesn't get fucked up (especially since I think I can get the upgrade for at least the first leg), and that it doesn't kill the power at home.  It might not be a bad idea to grab a mysqldump of my rss reader stuff, so I can install it on my laptop and run it from there if the power goes down for a long time.

Basically, I'm saying it's not this.

• Maybe Capcom should come up with new games.  Will they just keep remaking Resident Evil every three generations?
• Bruce agrees with me.  Hush is a fucking joke.
• It's far harder to be a dick when the people trying to fuck over are standing right there.  Publicly shaming politicians should be a standard tactic.
• I was going to comment about how I could save like $8 if I could get rid of the channels I don't watch, but then I remembered I don't pay directly for my cable.

That led me to go look at things that are powerlaws, and so I plotted up my DVR channel usage ranking:

Doesn't quite match the best fit model, mostly because Cartoon Network is 51% of all recordings ever, and I didn't feel like excluding that point to fit the rest of the channels.  A quick guess suggests it should only have about 800 recordings to match the bulk trend, so it's about 6x higher than a super simple model would account for.  I wonder what this looks like in hours.

Monday: So this is how today worked

I mean, WTF, The Weather?

• That's unfortunate.
• Partially because it was the scene of this wonderful post from six years ago.
• Missile defense systems are generally useless.
• Batgirl.
• I really like gifs like this.
• No.  Having different lengths but identical widths only works if you sort the bills by denomination, and then align against a right angle edge.  Otherwise, the possible arrangements make it likely that small bills get lost.  

Sunday: That was the lamest "tropical storm" ever.

Basically it just rained kind of hard last night.  There was thunder and lightning, which is cool, because we usually don't get that here.  But still, in the end, it was just a regular amount of rain for me.

I tried to take some super long (8s, the max my camera can do) shots to see if I could capture some lightning, but it didn't work.  Still, I liked how these two came out:

This one shows the light pollution is concentrated at ala moana (left), ward center (center), and downtown (right).

I like the cars in this one.

Then today, I took a bunch of shots to show the clouds coming over the mountains:

This is about a minute of action.

• Dog.
• Book.
• That episode of Chowder where they had a live action car wash to pay for the animation.

Sunday: Well, now I'm too cold.

Returning that fan to Target went much easier than I expected.  "What's wrong with it?"  "Well, it's kind of noisy, and when you turn it on, it scoots across the floor." "Hahahahaha!  I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh, but that's kind of funny."  "Yeah, but it's kind of annoying to deal with."

The replacement fan is a oscillating fan on a big stand.  I didn't go with the remote control version, because really, not even I'm so lazy that I can't get up and change the fan setting.  This fan isn't perfect, as I was hoping that I could simply park it in the middle of my apartment, and point it at the living room or bedroom depending on where I was.  The breeze is a bit too unfocused at a distance for that to work, but it's pretty close.  Of course, just after I finished setting it up, the trade winds started blowing nicely through my window, making this whole operation a bit less pressing than it was last week.

You can't read it because I was wobbly, but the bottom left star is signed "I am Catbug!"

• Comics and things.
• I know I have this story in some collection.  Definitely one of the best Joker stories ever.
• Oglaf is generally NSFW, but this comic isn't really.  It's also hilarious.
• As was today's Wonderella.
• I'm a little surprised that Constantine is getting a TV show.  Sure, it's probably one of the easier DC properties to convert, but still.  Constantine.  Huh.
• Other things.
• I'm thinking I should go to the zoo.  It's been a long time since I last went to one.
• The president got a waffle.  Now I want waffles.  Thanks, Obama.
• Zubat.
• I found "cool," "spem," and "killful."  Then I realized that was probably supposed to be "skillful," and also probably not supposed to be in Latin.

Wednesday: Technically, it's "effective Thursday"

Since Friday is a holiday.

Dear Open Table, five of these restaurants are on different islands.  I'm unlikely to fly someplace for dinner.

I get that they have a database, and "Hawaii" is the entire database for Hawaii, but it can't be that hard to split by island.

• Squirrel.
• Wait until you get to the flowchart.
• This is dumb.  Also dumb: they changed their recipe and now it's really shitty.  Now there's basically just one frozen pizza I like, and it's only sold in like half of all the grocery stores here.

Saturday: Ramen and Taxes

After doing basically nothing all day (except yelling at flash game developers for not understanding how to construct a difficulty curve.  A Heaviside function is not what you should be aiming for.), I decided I was either going to get pancakes or ramen for lunch/dinner.

There were gyoza as well, but they were gone before I got my ramen.

 Then some quick grocery shopping.

Did you know that the staircase at Safeway is one of the best places to take photos of Diamond Head?

Finally, since taxes are due this week, I sat down and threw numbers at pdf forms until I had my yearly "I have made my best effort at your stupid forms, The Government" attempt.  I appear to have magically sorted out the withholding crap last year.  I owe the federal government $15, but I'm getting $25 back from the state.  Compared to the last two years, this is pretty good.

• Animals.
• Squirrel.
• Bees are cool.
• Hoppip.
• Other group 1.
• Kitty Pryde is still super cool.
• Huh.  I had planned to go bowling tomorrow, but I guess I'm going to watch Ernest and Celestine.
• Other group 2.
• I never understood sunken living rooms, but I love those shelves.
• I kind of want to make stromboli rolls.
• Hawaii is nicely placed for this week's eclipse.

Monday: I guess it's going to rain this evening

It seems like a safe bet.

• Serious stuff.
• This is why my google hangout stuff doesn't work.  I guess I should try one of these solutions, since google is apparently incapable of making sure "thing they make A" work with "thing they make B."  You know, kind of like google+ and everything else.
• Here you go, google.
• Did you know that the Kresge behind such things as the Kresge art museum is the same K as in Kmart?  Also, they totally just saved the DIA, so that's good too.
• Jobs.
• I don't get Weather Channel.  Probably because a place where it's always the same doesn't need it.  That might also explain the suprise rain storm.
• Not serious stuff.
• Bunny. And backpack.
• Doge.  And Teen Titans.
• Pokemon. And food.
• Thor. And food.
• Godzilla.  And science.

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?

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.

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.

Sunday: Sun day

Other than me messing with panorama projections, what's odd with this photo?

Trans-Mercator.  For when regular Mercator doesn't quite look right.  This one bends buildings, but seems to preserve a flat horizon pretty well.

Luckily, last night I put the TV on local news as a "figure out what to do for dinner, and until you do: local news" strategy.  That led me to hearing that today is Honolulu's "Lahaina Noon" day.

What's that?

Basically, since Hawaii is in the tropics, there are two days each year where the sun is directly overhead.  Like it is on the equator on equinoxes, or on the tropics on solstices. I'll have to catch the second one on July 15th, if I can.

In any case, here are random close-ups of things without shadows.

That's the power line.

I should have taken a picture of the top, so you can see all the stuff there.  You can see it in the panorama on top, though.

Sign.

Vent pipes.

More different vent pipes.

This sign has a shadow.  If you look closely, though, you can see that it's because this sign is crooked.

Parasailer.

Plane.

I liked this one.

My hands, holding the camera taking this picture.

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."