Reminders for myself

1. Maybe lay off the Saturday Sushi routine for a while.  I think the people who work there are starting to recognize you.
2. Buy more lightbulbs for the kitchen, because I think we're down to 25%.  Side note: I suspect CFLs don't really live up to their quoted lifetime.
3. Come up with a third item for this list.

Saturday: "Yay! The strength of my well designed theoretical models for data!"

It turns out that because of the way I wrote some code, it magically works in more cases than it was designed for.  That's a good way to spend a Saturday.  Being retroactively productive.

I do the same thing.  Pretty much anyplace where my car can look at something is better than not.

• Bunny surprise!
• I don't like zoos that look like this.  Still, bear!
• "Bears are awesome."
• Fuck you, Wyoming.

Friday: put title here

"Pizza would taste better. Bears like pizza. Little known fact."

• Baby squirrels.
• Saddest Team Rocket picture ever.

Thursday: I have nothing today

So Peebles and Marceline as Nurse Joy and Officer Jenny.

Notebooks

I like proper notebooks to store my stuff in.  In grad school, I used these:

$1.50ish. The ACCO ones are probably the best quality.

You triple whole punch your looseleaf pages (or the occasional journal article you printed out), and use the flappy steel retaining bar to hold it closed.  The nice thing about this is that when you complete the project, you can use these screw posts (someplaces apparently call them "Chicago posts"):

Only sold in insane quantities.

Basically, you use these when you're done, and are them left with a notebook comprised of looseleaf pages that is easily bound and able to live on a bookshelf without trouble.

However, after spending a month visiting another institution, I switched over to these books:

Like $8.

Pre-bound, wonderful grade paper, far easier to carry while walking than the five pound 600 page tomes I'd been making up to that point.  Smaller, and I waste a lot of space, as I only write on the right sheets.  The left sheets are there for indexing, quick notes and calculations, and thumbnail diagrams.  It's kind of a modified Cornell notes system that I use.  I skip the summary section, but noting keywords makes things far easier to find.

Wednesday: Sea salt caramel gelato is also tasty

(just a reminder)

Pictures and links today.  I'm too tired to put together any kind of big project.  Except for claiming that as of today, I believe I have converted at least three people to the Wonders of the Land of Ooo.

It has good philosophies for life.

I've seen two different censored versions of this tweet/capture.  That's fucking stupid, because if you go to the url that's clearly not censored, you can see who wrote it, his real-fake name, and his icon.  What does this censoring accomplish besides being a waste of time?

Bunny!

• I wish I'd had a puppy rental during college/grad school/right now.
• Aptly named Dick Armey.  "You can't make money from this propaganda machine, and you'll have to get someone to pay me a bunch of money to leave this propaganda machine."
• I'm sure this joke has been made.  Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, is a lunatic.

Tuesday: I'm just not even going to try today

"What...what is happening?"

Monday: I hate writing

I saw this episode yesterday. She braided her ears.  WTF, Lola?

Cats.  Still jerks.

You are very excited, Mr. Otter.

• The baby polar bear pictures from 1982 are cute. The grown up polar bear picture from 2012 are cuter.
• I didn't see Adventure Time today, because I was busy rewriting a paper.
• I thought that was cool, then I realized it wasn't Axis and Allies, it was Risk.
• Thanks, RSS, for again reminding me.  "Princess Cookie" should win, though.
• Bunny & Rabbit.

Sunday: I can see the rain in you, sky. Stop messing around and just do it.

That was one of today's annoyances.  The other was the jackass (or set of jackasses) who have anti-mufflers on their cars, making excessive "ZOOM ZOOM" sounds as they drive up the street outside.  If you can only feel something when you're zooming from 5 to 27 mph in first gear, and then require three seconds to shift into second, you need to find a better hobby.  I suggest "actually learning to drive a damn car."

I didn't know what I wanted for lunch until it wasn't lunch anymore, nor was it even late lunch.  It was just standard dinner at that point.  I didn't want to cook, and nothing really sounded good.  I went to honolulu burger again, and decided against getting a burger in favor of the Philly Dip.  Kind of a geographical mix going on, with the Philadelphia cheesesteak blending with the French Dip, but it was pretty good.  Some complaints (as always).  The steak should have been cooked a bit differently to ensure the connective tissue had properly broken down.  More cheese, fewer onions.  The "basically 1000 island" secret sauce is kind of out of place and just makes it sloppier.  However, since HBC uses local beef, the sandwich works fine with these issues because the beef simply tastes beefier.  Garlic fries on the side, but I should just stop ordering fries here.  I can barely finish the sandwich, and I feel bad throwing away 50-70% of my fry basket.  They really need like a "tiny" size.  Like a McDonald's mini fry bag size as an option with a burger.

Significantly later dessert was some of this delicious black raspberry with chocolate chip gelato.  I added a chocohigo, because I impulse bought them yesterday.  They're more expensive this year, making this dessert about $3 in components.  Still, super tasty.

Lions and tigers and bears! "Dude, I know one of you two decorated our house with these pumpkins.  I'm not even angry anymore, I just want you to be honest with me and stop blaming it on 'some guy in a tan suit.'  I'm not buying that."

Snow fox is bad with cocaine.

• Class warfare in airline classes.
• I hate John Boehner for being an idiot and a coward.
• Cats are jerks.

I also was informed that I answered the questions "wrong" yesterday, because I "didn't actually come up with a full menu plan for new years."  Fine.  New Year's, Appetizer Style:

• Mini crab cakes
• Baked colcannon balls with drawn butter
• Quick fried scallops with a lemon/herb aioli
• Assorted sausages and cheeses.
• Mini stromboli segments.
• Spinach parmesan wontons
• Kabucha tempura
• Fried asparagus, to share the aioli
• Mixed green salad, apple cider/sriracha dressing
• Shortbread, strawberries, and pepper balsamic whipped cream
• Chocolate shells with assorted ices and sorbets.

Seven questions?

1) What Adventure Time character is your favorite and why? 

Ice King. Because he has Wizard Eyes. He also has the best backstory of anyone on the show.  

2) What's the perfect New Year's Eve dinner menu? 

Stromboli?  That's a bit silly, but it sounds good.  Plus it can be sliced up into appetizer size bits (or just made that way to start).  Crab cakes are also a good idea.  Basically, a lot of tiny small bites, instead of a proper meal.

3) If you could go back in time and change your major, what would you change it to? 

I don't know. Archaeology/Classics? That's kind of even less useful than astronomy. Even though I do a bunch of amateur economics, I'm not really sure I'd enjoy doing it full time (and hated the class in college).  However, I really enjoyed the classics classes I took.  It's a shame that MSU doesn't offer most of those anymore, but again, "even less useful than astronomy."

4) Who makes the best chili-cheese fries? 

These were pretty good.  I guess I don't usually get chili cheese fries that often.  

5) What's been your favorite book you've read this year? 

Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning.  Kind of a let down, I know, but there's a lot of really useful math in this book that I've been trying to get coded up.

6) What vacation spot would you want to visit in the U.S. in 2013? 

Kauai, probably. It's next on the list of Hawaiian islands that I haven't been to.  I think it's kind of a long weekend thing, whereas the other islands (Molokai, Lanai) seem like they're just day trip things.

7) cake or pie? recipe for your favorite.

Does cheesecake count?  I'm not totally sure this is my absolute favorite, but I have a picture of the recipe ready to go.  It's really super rich, so you have to cut the slices fairly small.

Saturday: And I thought I wouldn't have anything to post today

Piikoi and Davenport.

I was eating dinner when I heard the tires squealing and then a horrible crunching sound.  I got to the lanai in time to see someone in a white pickup truck with a cap backing up slowly from this car that they had slammed into.  Since no one got out of the car, I assume it had been parallel parked with Captain Crashy smashed into it.  My first thought was, "huh, this guy is going to run," based on the fact that he never put on hazard lights, or got out of the car, or anything of the sort.  And, as you can tell by the lack of white pickup truck in this picture, he totally ran, despite the shouts of "hey!" from various people nearby.

So that was kind of exciting.

No.

"Oh fuck!"

• Botswana.
• I guess it makes sense that showers weren't always a common thing.  Still, the idea of a booklet called "Once-Used Water" is a bit silly.  I also like the creepy stalker "would you mind mentioning your plumber's name?"
• I guess I have something in common with Mitt Romney.  We both like Boston Market.

Friday: I hate falling asleep while reading my rss feeds

Mostly because I usually have my hand resting on the N-P-space keys to navigate.  Then, when I fall asleep, I tend to push the N key repeatedly until I reach the end of the list of updates.

I have nothing else unposted, so here's Pikachu.

• Not a squirrel.
• A friendly squirrel.
• Crunchy is the one true peanut butter.
• Even though it was dinner every Sunday in undergrad for like three years, I still miss DP Dough.  Maybe because it was dinner every Sunday in undergrad for like three years.

Thursday: Why do I always come up with complicated things?

At some point during the day today, I saw a link to a plot of "Corporate Profits after Tax" from FRED, and that made me start wondering.  That's a pile of profits (after tax).  How does it compare with the federal deficit? 

CP is tabulated quarterly, and I've inverted FYFSD and converted into equivalent billions of dollars.

Huh.  That's kind of fucking crazy.  Let's make a thought experiment, and say that we magically went back in time to 1970 and added a 10% additional tax on corporate profits.  What does that plot look like?

I'm summing CP annually, and dividing by 10 to get this "experimental tax"

Next up, let's look at the cumulative debt that is built up over the time range (the debt in 1970 was something like $371e9, so that's ignored here).

Ok, so we're stable until the 80s (thanks Reagan), the bump is the rate increase in 1986, then magically things turn around in the 90s (thanks Microsoft), which pushes us up into surplus territory until the looting excesses of the Bush years finally crush the economy in such a way that the only way to keep people from starving is for an increase in government spending.  Still, this hypothetical 10% tax would have put the US on a far firmer economic structure.

Makes you wonder what the benefit of letting GE not pay any taxes ever must be to outweigh this scenario.

And that's how I spent my evening.

With pinkies out.

"Hey little girl.  We are two tiny lost bears, who only wish to return home to the forest. Perchance would you be willing to spare some change to help unfortunates such as us?"

• Following up Tuesday's post: Nidoran do have distinct genders.
• I believe that Pat Robertson has been replaced with a clone.
• Joe Biden is clearly the coolest VP ever in the history of ever.  This could be an Onion article without any changes.
• I like the Squirrel Girl one.
• :-( (PNSFW)
• ChronoTrigger was a great game.  I've named certain software I've written after characters in it.

Wednesday: Ok, let's be honest here

Yesterday's blog post spiraled out of control.  It started in one place, zoomed off the wrong way down the highway, stopped for a bit in the Viridian Forest, and then crashed off a cliff.

It was fun though.

In any case, today is a simpler post.

Part 1: A Bear

"Wait, this isn't the right way to do this. Fuck."

 Part 2: Philosophy

 Part 3: The Unexpected Nature of Life

 Part 4: Shy dog

Part 5: The Links

• That is one fancy fucking bathroom.
• Unacceptable!
• I don't listen the the Impact much anymore, but I like knowing it's still there.  Unfortunately, this article makes no sense as to what is going on there.
• Food assistance costs increase as the demand for them increases.  The fact that some members of congress think that this is a reason to put caps on the funding proves that they do not understand economics, and hate poor people.
• Why couldn't they have discovered like a type of cute kitty that does this?  Why fucking jellyfish?

Tuesday: Grumpy contrarianism

Part 1: Thermodynamics is better than chemistry.

I've tried piles of different cleaning supplies, and have never been that happy with them.  There are three main examples of this:

1. Toothpaste in the sink.  How do other people not have this problem?  Do you all just rinse the sink until it's clean right away?  In any case, I believe I've proven that toothpaste residue is impervious to all chemicals known.
2. Bathtub...soap...ring...thing?  Basically that grey bar in my tub where the minerals in my water and the soap suds combine to form another substance that laughs at chemicals.
3. The floor in front of my stove.  Because of the way my apartment ventilates, grease from cooking fumes condenses down next to the wall.  Swiffer glides over this, shrugs it's shoulders, and silently mocks me for believing it could clean a damn thing.  The problem is that the vinyl flooring is textured, and the only way I've discovered to clean this is to scrub with a toothbrush.  Therefore, as you can expect, this doesn't happen often.

Sure, there are probably harsher chemicals, but my apartment building is reasonably old, so dumping concentrated aqua regia down the drains isn't a good idea.  Plus, my apartment isn't quite ventilated as well as a fume hood.  Therefore, let's take the strategy that if heating aqua regia is a default chemistry step, super heating regular water is basically the same concept: admitting that chemistry has failed you, and you need to start adding heat, due to the fundamental principle of the universe: Chemistry sucks, and Thermodynamics is by definition, way cooler.  And hotter.  It does both.

Yeah, sure, Mr. XKCD, whatever.  Stat Mech is almost entirely math anyway, so adding that large gap to be funny isn't that accurate.

Enter the McCulloch MC1235 1300-Watt Handheld Steam Cleaner.  Not the most powerful device around, but I'm willing to throw $40 on a new toy that might help me clean things.  I tried it against the three things listed above, as well as just about everything that wasn't covered in books (since books + steam = wrinkly pages, and that's never good).  Let's rank it!

• Ease of use: 6.  You kind of have to get close to the surface to ensure the hottest steamiest steam steams the surface clean. With steam.
• Noxious smells: 2.  You can get that "angry clothes iron" smell occasionally.  Since, honestly, they are the same devices with different outer shells.
• Cleantissitude: 5(9).  Decent enough, steaming things up, wiping them down with a paper towel, noticing it's better.  Yeah, ok.  Then you change to the scrubby nozzle.  Shoot steam into a forest of hard plastic scrubby brush.  This immediately solved all of the "I have Grime X on this surface. Woe is me" kind of issues.  Toothpaste? Gone.  Grey bar of nastiness? Gone.  Oven grease on uneven vinyl? Shiny clean.
• Practicality: 4.  The effective working area is roughly an inch in diameter.  This isn't really practical for cleaning an entire floor.  Cleaning the bad spots on the floor isn't really that bad, but a full room would be hard.
• Cool "rooty-tooty-point-and-shooty" stylings: 10.

So, adding up the numbers, this earns a 31.  That's a prime number.

I will therefore be cleaning random things that can be steamed this weekend.  I guess it does shirts too?  Like a regular non-shooty iron?  I'll find my wrinkliest shirt, and see if I can make that work too.  Of course, 95% of the time, I'm wearing shirts that need ironing after cramming them into a suitcase and flying them across the world before pulling them out in a wadded mess.

Part 2: I'm going to complain about Pokemon Genders

I saw this pop up in my RSS feed today:

My initial thought: "they have different tails for male and female pikachu?"  So first step was off to the internets to learn about that.  Serebii has sprite pictures:

Which further research notes were first introduced in Gen 4.  

This led me to remembering a previous episode "Pikachu's Goodbye," where Team Twerp runs into a pile of wild pikachu, Team Rocket/blasts away, Ash thinks he should leave Pikachu with the wild ones, flashbacks, Pikachu returns.  Turns out that episode (like all of everything) is available online now.  So I grabbed some screen shots:

Pika-kiss?  Does that suggest that the "fringed tail" seen on the left pokemon is a girl?

Straight tails seem to dominate, but there's another fringe tail.

Same here.  Similar statistics. 6 straight to 1 fringe.

Composite of those two frames.  Note the ghost face and the double face.  Still, not bad. :)

Pikachu shows up, with initial distrust.

Mostly straight tails as they approach.

Cute tail shake.

Rescue from a rive with a chain of fringe tail pikachu.  Lazy animation or bizarre gender roles in pikachu society?  "Men: surround strangers! Women: form living chains to rescue swimmers!"

Team Rocket captures everyone.

Ok, assume a spherical net.  I estimate a chord across that bottom right edge as having length  C = 353.9pxl with height H = 48.8pxl.  This leads to the sphere radius of R = (h/2) + (c^2)/(8 h) = 66.37 ft^3, using the relation that 1 pikachu = 182.8pxl = 1.33 ft.  Assuming a volume of a pikachu is Vpika = 1.33 * (pi * (1.33 / 2)^2) = 1.8478 ft^3, so this net holds about 35.919, say 36 pikachu.  Yeah.  I can see that based on the pictures.

Flashback time:

First meeting.

First running in terror from swarms of pissed off pokemon.

Then the wild pikachu offer up a pikachu salute as everyone leaves, and it's a happy ending.

This picture is from a different episode, but I had to include it. Due to the derp.

What was I talking about again?  Oh yeah, cosplayers not being totally accurate with a retcon that showed up to add another dimension to the collect them all game.  And then people bitching about it, largely in what seems to be a "you fail, nerd girl" kind of attitude.  And then I decided I wanted to look at pikachu, and now it's officially an hour later than I thought it was.  Fuck.

Wait, did I just accidentally come up with something close to a definitive study of the tails of pikachu?

TL;DR: if you want to dress like Pikachu, you have every right to do so, and no one should tell you you're wrong.  Unless you're dressing up as an eldritch evil demon disguised as Pikachu.  That's not cool.

Part 3: But...that's not my Monte Cristo

I saw this on the Whole Ox twitter feed today:

source

source

Mortadella is not both ham and turkey.  Gruyere is not both swiss and cheddar.

I still want to eat one.

Also, to Instagram: I can still download those photos.  Why not just give me a link so I don't have to jump through hoops.

Part 4: Links. Do I have any of those left?

• Grant Morrison is a hack.  People who are secure in what they do and know that they write good, original things don't tend to lash out at people who say bad things about them.  And in case he reads it: You are like 80% of the reason that I stopped reading comics.  Your bullshit with Batman, your bullshit with the Fifth World stuff, your bullshit story-and-sense-free Final Crisis.  I don't want to read you masturbating to the comics you read as a kid.  I want to read interesting stories about characters that I actually give a damn about.
• I hope this isn't the final end to Baman Piderman.  Drawn crudely, minimal dialogue, and characters I actually give a damn about having interesting adventures.  Huh.  Seems like I now know why I like this show even more.
• No good third link, so here's weather cat. "Fuck you, Eduardo."