Tuesday: It's actually reasonably easy to write a user guide

How useful it will be to other people who haven't spent years working with the thing it's a guide to is a different question, but at least I have the majority of the important things done.

I've finally figured out what this thing is:

It's above the exterior doors at work.

It's a device to ensure that the left door is always closed before the right door.  The right door has a lip on it that prevents the lock from being damaged, but would prevent the left door from closing if the right closed first.  However, due to "the device," if you open both doors at the same time, the little wheeled bar falls down, as the metal plate on the left door is not there to keep the pawl on the device has nothing to keep it up.  The bar then prevents the right door from closing fully, so the left door should be able to slip in under the lip.  I don't think the leverage is sufficient for the left door to then force the right door back open enough for the wheeled bar to be free, but it's still kind of neat.

And to think it only took me like four years to sort out what it does, other than make a "clank-clank" sound when you open the door.

Squirrel spy.

• I'm on the bear's side.
• No, deer, that's not for you.
• I am knocking.
• History.
• Racoon.

Monday: I felt artistic today

Monday is always terrible because it's full of meetings.  During the part of meeting 2 that was a duplicate of part of meeting 1, I became suddenly bored.  So I drew a tiny house.  The boredom continued, so I put a tiny tree next to the tiny house.  This unbalanced the framing, so I decided to draw a sun in the sky. Instead of my standard "straight line" rays, I went with the more cartoonish "triangle fringe" rays.  This made the sun look a bit like a lion, so I completed the picture by drawing in two eyes and a sideways "3" kitty mouth.

Then, later in the day, I saw this news story in my twitter feed, with the title "Big Isle tries to deal with threatening trees."  This was what immediately popped into my head:

I added the extra "rar!" because I decided that the threatening tree wasn't scary enough, even with its weapons, spooky teeth, and demands for undeserved financial compensation.

• I guess all other radios can go away now.  This one is the best looking one ever, and it's eighty years old.
• Lightning pizza.
• Breaking news: R. GLENN HUBBARD and TIM KANE are fucking shitbags.  And that's only because I'm too tired to come up with more inventive insults.  Seriously, if you can read this, and not want to punch them in the face for being lying assholes, you're a better person than me.  Balanced budget amendment my ass.
• This is why I don't understand the wikileaks people's obsession with "we have to go to places outside the reach of the evil US government!"  Your new poster boy fled to Russia, which is brazenly announcing that they're planning on maybe arresting people who visit for the Olympics, just because they don't realize we live in the 21st century.  On top of that, the Olympics committee is basically saying, "don't make any waves, or we'll kick you out of our little sports party" if you point out how fucking shitty that is, most likely because the corporate sponsors who fund everything don't want to have bad publicity.  So, legally codified human rights violations and a bunch of corporate sponsors who just want to make some money are way better than the US, right?  You can claim all you want that you just want to expose secrets and show people "the truth," but if you're doing that not only without a concept of justice, but with the backing of actual injustice, you've lost all credibility. Plus, get a look at how those stupid fucks in the first picture in the first link give a thumbs up.  That's not up, jackass.  You want to be on the same team as people who don't know a simple gesture?
• Here are 100 bunnies, because after that rant, I needed to look at bunnies, so maybe you need to do so now too.
• Dear the Mythbusters, if you say "we used sulfuric acid plus another secret chemical, and it was super effective, but we're not going to tell you what the secret chemical is because SAFETY," you might want to remember that we have the internet now, and it's pretty easy to figure things out.  Even when you're not that kind of scientist, and didn't even like chemistry when you took it.
• While we're talking about deadly things, here's a review of an episode of ST:TNG that I remember thinking was incredibly stupid because everyone has to leave the Enterprise because of a "baryon sweep."  Where they shoot baryons at the ship. Baryons.  It's not like those are common (not these).

Sunday: That's what was missing

I had the feeling yesterday after eating those wings that something else was missing.  It took me until today to figure out what that was:  you can't properly have wings without blue cheese dressing.  That led me to trying to resolve this issue by getting a burger with blue cheese on it:

With truffle fries.

Yet another reason I probably won't be going back to that wing place anytime soon.

• This list seems kind of dumb.  "This city has a pizza place that people wait hours for! It's the best pizza in teh country!"  Give real reasons next time.
• This is one of my favorite episodes.
• Yep.  Pretty much.
• Street cars.  Because why not.

Saturday: Let's just say that I was disappointed

After playing a standard game of "what do I want for dinner," I came to the conclusion that I should try out Wings and Things by Serg.  It's close to work, and I tend to get pizza next door every week or so.  The yelp page is full of people talking about "how big the wings are."  This is a mistake, and nearly a lie.

First, let's review the anatomy of a chicken.  Turn to page 2, review the skeletal structure, and then skip to page 6, and go over the musculature.  Fundamentally, a chicken wing is composed of three regions:  the "drumette," corresponding to the upper arm on a person; the "flat," matching the forearm; and the "wing tip," analogous to a hand.  The skeletal names are the same as in people too: humerus in the drumette; radius and ulna in the flat; metacarpals in the tip.

Now, the proper way to cook wings is to sever these three parts with a knife prior to cooking.  The wing tip is discarded, as it contains basically zero meat.  The drumette and flats are then fried and tossed in sauce, and then eaten.  This provides two hand-sized portions per anatomical wing, both of which are easy to eat.  The drumette is eaten by holding the small ("elbow") end, and biting off the meat.  The flat is actually easier to eat, as you simply hold both ends, twist in opposite directions, and feel the two bones separate.  In the ideal case, you can remove the ulna, and then simply suck the meat off the radius.

As you can see from the picture below, the entire wing has been fried and sauced here.  This is incredibly difficult to handle at the table.  The joints have a number of tendons, which makes them difficult to separate, even after frying.  This is why you cut them in the kitchen.  The superfluous wing tips serve little purpose here, other than to inflate the apparent serving size.  The final reason this is not the way to do things is that when you sauce the separated wings, there is more surface area, so the wings retain more sauce.

"Six" wings = 6 drumette + 6 flats + 6 useless tips.  Fries are a mix of curly, straight and waffle.  Root beer.

So, ignoring the fact that the wings were prepared incorrectly, how were things?  The sauce was a bit light, again an issue with the connected wings.  I went with medium Buffalo, which was a bit milder than I was hoping for.  When I could separate the parts, it was tasty, but there was a lot of extra work involved.  This was more difficult than it should have been, as the wings were still hot from the oil.  The fries were very good, cooked to a perfect crisp.

I wasn't that impressed with the wings, partially due to the serious amount of work needed to enjoy them.  It might be better to get the tenders next time instead of wings, as that would allow a better judge of flavor without the complicating factor of "doing it wrong."

"Hey! Get in! I left my license at home, so you'll have to drive!"

• Bee and Puppycat.  Seriously.  Go watch it.
• A quick summary of how insurance works, why retirement is effectively insurance, and why it's best run in a centralized manner.
• Pikachu.
• It's nice to see that absolute fucking morons can try to be politicians in other countries, too.
• BMO.
• I saw this article, and it again reinforced why I put in these commands in my LaTeX documents when I'm writing papers.  The idea being that all editorial comments that aren't the final text show up in colors.  That makes it nearly impossible that you accidentally leave something inappropriate in the document text.
• \newcommand{\draft}[1]{\textcolor{red}{#1}}
• \newcommand{\replace}[2]{\sout{\textcolor{red}{#1}}~\textcolor{blue}{#2}}
• \newcommand{\question}[1]{\textbf{DISCUSS! }\textcolor{green}{#1}}

Friday: because I still have 600 RSS things to read

So there's just a bear today.

"Yeah, sure.  Put gloves on the bear so he doesn't rip my face off.  You're a coward, little man.  A pitiful little coward."

Thursday: because that's just how it is sometimes.

• Huh.  That looks delicious.
• "Dead, too."
• Fooling babies is always funny.
• Bee and Puppycat should be watched by everyone.
• I hate that plot they're using.  By arbitrarily choosing 2002 as the zero point, it removes the fact that a mean or median would be a better way to look at changes.  Using that method, pain relievers and hallucinogens are pretty much statistically flat.  The other thing is that meth and heroin are basically in phase until 2007, suggesting hidden variables at play.  After that, it looks like meth and heroin are basically trading places.  Finally, cocaine is what you do if you didn't OD and die in the 80s.

Wednesday: Let's pretend I didn't spend a large chunk of the day working on a user guide

Especially since it seems that very few of the people who have actually tried to use the program seem to have had trouble with it.  Compiling issues, sure; data format errors, yes; but no one's actually not been able to use it.

I'm not saying it's fool-proof, but I did try my best to make it such that you have to actively lie to it to get incorrect results.

How did the back wheel deflate?

• I just now discovered that Ian Jones-Quartey is the same guy who made a webcomic I used to read years ago.  Now he works on real cartoons, and I've been enjoying them for about a year now.  Huh.
• Evil cat.
• Math is hard.
• Another thing to read later that I won't end up reading later.

Tuesday: So that's an hour gone, and now you're going to have to live with the consequences.

In my RSS feeds, I have a tumblr that posts pictures of games with bears.  This showed up today.  All I could think was, "holy shit, I fucking loved that game when I was like six."  Also, I just decided it's totally ok to swear in this review of a kids game, because kids today would never play it, so it doesn't fucking matter.

I then spent a long time trying different combinations of the words [bear,basket,catch,coins], until finally scanning the list of Apple2 games on gamefaqs.  Then one title jumped out at me, and I immediately knew it was the right game.

Stickybear Basket Bounce.

After finding the name of the game, it turns out it's kind of trivially easy to find copies that can be played on a modern computer via emulation.  The emulation was kind of broken, as a single tap on the arrow keys make Mr. Stickybear dash across the screen.  I thought you had to hold the key to move in the original, which would make it significantly easier.

Here's Stickybear in level 1.  Balls fall from the machine in the ceiling, and you have to catch them in the basket.

But if the ball hits Stickybear first, he gets knocked on his ass.  Hit detection is a bit odd, as you can catch with the bottom of the basket.

Level 2.  Same principle, but this time you have to catch coins.  Or rings.  Plates?  Whatever, matchine drops them again, etc.

Level 3: Stickybear in space.  The rocket-mushroom in the center shoots out stars that you need to catch.  This level also has a tiny worm creature that you have to jump over.  I didn't get a picture of that.

In all levels, once you lose all your baskets, this guy in the bulldozer shows up and pushes you off the screen.

That's pretty much it.  The levels loop after that, and I think they get faster and standard 1983 video game tricks.

• I was surprised when searching that Stickybear is still making games.  Crazy expensive educational games, but still.  Thirty years later.
• Bass dogs.
• This kind of makes me want to go see Pacific Rim.
• Gorilla.
• I saw this before watching Colbert tonight.  Kind of a shitty deal, although he did properly shame MTV for sucking at everything.

Monday: twenty-fucking-six

Either I screwed up the timezones, or everyone in existence was trying to snipe arXiv on Friday.  Maybe my clock is just off?  Whatever.  It'll probably be awhile before I have the chance to do it again.

Basically this.

• What an idiot.
• A very good reason not to work in the financial sector, even though I'm pretty sure they're probably not using that fancy of a set of algorithms, which would make it reasonably easy.  How do I know that?  If they're doing predictions that fast, there can't be many un-parallelizable calculations.
• "He spent four months refining the statistical model, based on 32 pieces of information, culled from consumer data bases, ranging from income level to military status and voting record in midterm elections. Veterans and midterm voters are both more likely to have health coverage."  Why is that?  Because veterans usually have VA coverage, and "midterm voters" => "old people" => "people who have government health care through Medicare."  So, basically, people who have the government provide health care have health care.  And it's not like old people have an irrational hatred of the ACA, right?
• Oh.  Fuck you, old people. (page 4)
• Hambo.
• This title is misleading.  If you sum up the "in school", "grace", and "deferment" columns, you get the fraction that are either still in school, just left school, or are in the military.  Isn't the whole point of student loans that you don't have to pay them until when none of those things apply to you?
• Squirrel.

Sunday: Three terrible lists

List 1: Things I planned on doing today (with those accomplished crossed off).

• Wake up.
• Do laundry.
• Take out trash.
• Go get a new turn signal light for my car, because the one I have no longer blinks correctly.
• Do a blog post.

List 2: Things I wish I had to eat, but don't have, so I ate an apple instead.

• Brownies.
• A stereotypical doughnut, with pink frosting and lots of little sprinkles.
• A BLT.  Or, alternatively, that "bacon panini."
• I don't know, maybe a pasta dish or something?

List 3: Other lists I didn't end up making.

• List of the coolest math.
• List of the worst endings to old movies I've ever seen (today).
• List of channels I never watch on TV, because they're pretty much universally crap.
• List of USB IR remote doodles that suck and broke, so now I can't watch crap on my DVR.
• Any list that doesn't suck.

Link.  Singular.

• It is the king of the bunnies.

Saturday: Less good sushi options

I've been trying to expand my selections at the sushi place, as I don't want to be boring and get the same thing every time.  I think they have like ~110 options, so limiting myself to only five or six regular options would be dumb.  However, occasionally it goes wrong.

Texas roll and ika karaage.  I like calamari, so why haven't I gotten this before.

Unakyu roll.  Using Japanese contraction math: Unakyu = Una[gi] + Kyu[cumber].  It's an eel and cucumber roll.  Not bad, but not quite as good as the standard unagi nigiri.

This is where things went wrong.  Tendon shrimp.  I thought it'd just be regular shrimp in a tempura batter on the nigiri.  Nope.  Notice how the top shrimp kind of has an eye?  Yeah, these still have the shells on them, so I was able to take one bite before realizing this was not the dish for me.  Only one I think I've ever not finished.  But seriously, how gross does that sound?  It still has wiggly legs attached.

• Food-like related links.
• Nope.
• I'm pretty sure I've had this before when I was a kid.  If I remember correctly, it had a mix for the crust, and a can of sauce.  It wasn't the best ever pizza, but it wasn't objectionable to a four-six year old.  However, my mom also never followed any of the horror that "International Pizza Parade" brings up.
• Reasons for cake.
• Red pandas.
• Red pandas.

Friday: Wow, that was just brutal

It's going to lose a lot here, since I missed the first 75% of the show, and the fact that it's in Japanese means I missed more when I stopped reading the subtitles.  I don't know what episode it was, but I'm pretty sure it's season 8.

Anyway, the two cops [This is where I looked to see where my reference was to Partners, but I can't find a blog post about it.  Maybe I just did tweets?  Anyway, here's what you need to know: 1) crime drama show from Japan.  2) The main characters are Old Cop and Young Cop.  Young Cop does the running and chasing, and Old Cop does the thinking and deducting stuff.  He also gets to do the confrontation scenes. 3) It's pretty harsh.  A previous episode had a guy burning to death, if I recall correctly.  After he was stopped from burning a bunch of kids to death.  Yep.  Pretty harsh.]

Anyway, the two cops are in the house of who we're going to call "The Girlfriend."  Implicitly, there's also "The Boyfriend," but I think he's dead at this point, as we only see him in the flashback.  In any case, BF+GF totally straight up murdered this Old Guy who they thought stole a necklace from a family.  I don't know if they were related to the family, so maybe let's say that BF is the oldest son of the family.  Whatever.  Doesn't matter much.

So YC and OC are there, confronting GF about things.  OC throws out quotes of "you said before that Old Guy was probably just some loser who had no connections to the people around him." I suspect this is not a valid defense for straight-up-murder in Japan, but let's move on.  OC picks up a pair of white knit gloves, and kind of begins playing with them as he talks, ending up turning one inside out, and showing it to GF.  There are two dots drawn on the inside.  "And see, this is the proof that no one, not even Old Guy, was without connections."  GF looks at him like he's crazy, while YC stalks in the background, looking like he's ready to run and chase if he needs to.

More rambling stuff from the OC, who suddenly turns around to show this:

I guess Japan has a secret magic way to convert two gloves into a bunny puppet.  The two dots are the eyes for the puppet, and it has two arms and two ears, and the second glove works as like a band around the ears, and it's actually pretty cool.

Everyone's kind of surprised by this turn of events, especially those of us who missed most of the show.  Luckily, OC clarifies by telling this flashback story.  "The Youngest Daughter of the family had to stay home from school, as she had caught a cold in addition to her [UNSPECIFIED PRE-EXISTING RESPIRATORY DISTRESS].  She could look through the window and see all the kids running off to school, and playing, and doing kid things, but she was trapped inside.  However, every day, Old Guy would walk past her house on the way to the employment office, and began to notice her looking out the window."

We cut to a shot of the wall around the yard, with a tiny bunny puppet slowly crawling up onto the top ledge.  He slips once, (cut to shocked YD face!), but is able to get up, and waves his tiny bunny paws at the girl.

"Yes, this Old Guy was able to bring delight to the day of a Youngest Daughter trapped all alone.  She wanted to repay him, and decided to give him a gift of the heirloom necklace that would one day be passed on to her.  He probably thought it was just a toy, but in my flashback story, I'm going to have him refuse it like a dozen times, before finally taking it.  When it was discovered missing, Youngest Daughter did not want to get in trouble, so she kept quiet about what she had done.  I believe she did that because she was afraid that her family would make him give it back."

YC walks up with a torn business card that I can't read, and places it down on the table.  GF is in tears, since she S-U-Mered Old Guy over a present he'd received for basically being a fucking angel.

Next scene, GF stands on the balcony alone, calmly waiting for the approaching police to come and arrest her.  They in turn park neatly on the street, walk up, ring the bell, allow her to put on her shoes and grab a coat (it might be chilly), and lead her downstairs to the awaiting cop car.  Before she gets in, we hear a voice from off camera, "Hey, officer! My dog just found this, and I would like you to find its real owner!"

"Sure, Random Dog-Walking Passerby! We'll do that for sure!"

GF looks back, and begins to smile, as even though she's totally going to jail forever, at least the necklace was found.

Final scene, we cut to the restaurant that OC and YC are eating in.  YC asks OC what he told YD, which leads to a completely unnecessary flashback of OC returning the necklace to the YD.  "I told her that he wanted me to return it to her, as he has to travel far away for his new job."  YC sneezes, and they joke that he's caught the cold that OC had earlier.  Ha ha ha!

...

I know that was really long and weird, but holy crap.  The way OC explains to GF that she murdered that guy for no good reason in this calm and creepy way.

• Bee and PuppyCat OshawaCat.
• Bunny + Dog.
• Best responses ever.

Thursday: Hopefully the last math post for a while

I think I finally sorted out the issue today:  It's the Levenberg-Marquardt step.  The code is too aggressive with the lambda parameter, and as such, obtains a false minimum after a handful of iterations.  That minimum is decent, but isn't great, and we probably shouldn't be stopping there.  I played with how to change lambda around a few ways, but it either stops at the false minimum or runs until the iteration limit stops it.  It's just a matter of tuning, I guess.

Boot squirrel.

• Read the description of the Burger King.
• I kind of want to look into riding that train when I'm in Taiwan.
• You know how you're not supposed to wish bad things on others?  I'm pretty sure you can still enjoy it when they happen.
• Science programming.
• Another story I want to read, but I'm to sleepy to do so, so I'm sticking it here.  Like the one from yesterday.

The last link is something that you are going to have to stick with me for.  First, you need to know what a "google whack" is.  Next, you need to read this article on cracked, specifically #5.  Then, you need to use your vast useless knowledge of Dungeons and Dragons and note how that is remarkably close in spelling and concept to this creature.  Finally, you get this:

I can't actually use the words because that'd break it.

Unfortunately, I can't get that link to load, so I can't see if they're making the same connection.

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.