Monday: This week and next are weird 1-1-3-2 arrangements.

Due to election day tomorrow and veteran's day next Tuesday.  Since it's election day tomorrow, I probably should figure out who I'm voting for.

• Senator: Brian Schatz.  Because Cam Cavasso's ads make it sounds like supporting Obama is equivalent to sponsoring terrorists, so he's apparently crazy.
• Representative: Mark Takai.  Because I hate Charles Djou.
• Governor: David Ige.  Because splitting one side under the guise of a hypothetical "middle" is stupid, Mufi.
• State Representative: Della Au Belatti.  Because I like the newsletters that randomly show up and tell me about things I don't care about.  I don't know why they're so entertaining.
• Maui OHA Trustee: Carmen Lindsey.  Because I'm not sure about the other candidate.
• OHA At large Trustee: I have to pick three?  I don't know.  None of them really jump out as great.
• Amendments: 
• Judges: OMG, WTF cares?  Sure.  Public stuff is better than secret stuff.
• Agriculture: Still don't care.  Sure.  Bonds for agriculture is a good idea.
• Judges, again: No.  I would prefer not having judges be 80 years old.  Old people suck.
• Education: No.  Private daycare is private, and therefore shouldn't get public money.
• Dams: Actual real dams.  Yes.  If you own a dam, and want to make it safer, the state should help you do so.

Links, after an hour of reading boring election crap.

• Buffy.
• So the new Thor is Black Widow?  I guess that makes more sense than introducing a new character just to make her Thor, but I'm worried this is going to end up being one of those things where people talk about "that time when Black Widow was Thor."
• There are fast casual pizza restaurants?

I don't think Duke Aiona understands "helping".

The ad that played said, "help people get the down payment to buy a home."  So I went to look at this program.

Here's the "fact sheet."

The important points to take away from this are:

Q. How many people will this help? 

A. A projected average of 5,200 per year will be able to participate.

So this will help 1/3 of a percent of the population.  What do they need to do?  For the hypothetical $1500 rent/ $500 maintenance fees renter they model:

Number of Years Tenant Pays Down Payment Account Balance

5 $20,160

10 $44,520

15 $74,550

20 $110,880

25 $155,600 

Some math says this amounts to something like $300 a month going into a 4% interest fund.  Housing inflation in Hawaii seems to be about 1%, so that's an issue.  The other issue is that this hypothetical rental is $2000/month in total.  Using my apartment as a quick guess, this means the rental is somewhere in the $450k price range.  So even in a best case scenario, after 25 years in the program, you're still going to need to take out a loan for $300k.

Sunday: I did a lot of stuff today.

I finally went and bought a mini fridge for my office.

Then I drove to work and unloaded it.

And then I decided to get Mexican for dinner.

None of which I stopped to take a picture of, as you can see.  Tomorrow I'll have to flip the door around on the fridge, because although the cord is long enough to fit in the corner I want, it can't do it in the correct arrangement.  I would have done it today, but I don't have a screwdriver at work.

• Squirrel.
• Cats are jerks.
• Radish cat.
• Pizza.
• This is something that annoys me too.  I suspect it's based in a "oh, those scientists think they're so smart, but I'm the real smart person" ideology among people who don't like to be told they're not smart.

Saturday: Movie day

 I didn't think I had too much time for my movie plan for today, but I apparently planned poorly.  The matinee showings of Princess Kaguya were dubbed, so I had to wait for the 7pm show to see the subtitled version.

So the plan was to get sushi for dinner:

Done.

 I expected that I'd have to wait a long time to get a seat at the sushi place.  This was not the case, so I had lots of time to kill.  I wandered around the mall.

I got some gelato, because why not.

I found Doraemon again.

 And it eventually became movie time.

I used the Doraemon stamp on my receipt.

It's a very good movie.  The art is done in varying degrees of sketchiness, which works wonderfully for scenes.  The short chubby maid is a wonderful character, and adds a touch of humor and lightness to the story.

Which is otherwise horribly sad and depressing.  This is a movie in which no one has a happy ending.


I was also reminded why I generally don't like watching movies with other people.  Other people are stupid.  I sat down where I usually try to: most of the way to the front, centered.  Just before the trailers started, a dad and his daughter come in and sit right behind me.  They rustle all of their snacks and drinks around, and then the dad starts loudly chomping on popcorn.

Popcorn may be the least quiet food for a supposedly quiet space.

Still, not something you can get upset for.  Then the movie started.  The movie, that I've already mentioned, is the subtitled version.  The dad starts reading the subtitles to his daughter.  All of them.  I turned around and did the most polite thing I could, which was the shruggy arms up "seriously?" pose.  They then moved over to the side of the theater.

But still.  Seriously?  You go, "let's go to the movies!" but don't bother to look up to see which are the subbed and which are the dubbed screenings?  If you know your daughter can't read fast enough to keep up with subtitles, don't go to the subtitle one.

And then at the checkout at WF, all of my bananas had their necks snapped, so I did the only thing I could think of when I got home.  I taped the bananas back together so they don't go bad so fast.  Stupid lazy bananas.

• Corgis.
• A pie that is also a brownie.  This is the kind of technology we should be researching.
• Fact #15.  First up, you're agreeing to go to Antarctica for two and a half years.  Then, to double down the suck, you're only bringing Necco wafers.

Friday: The point is, it works.

And it's efficient.

• Fucking traffic was horrible.  You want to know the real reason traffic was so bad?  It's not this.  The reason comes in two parts.  1) People leave a fucking car length in front of them.  If we're only using 50% of the road surface, it's going to be inefficient.  2) People don't know what damn lane they want to be in.  I saw a number of cars jump from lane to lane without any real reason.  Just "oh, that looks like it's going faster!"  There's a bonus third part: 3) Street parking is stupid, and forces the public to subsidize land owners who don't want to spend the money necessary to construct their own parking.  I hate street parking, and will hate it forever.
• A tiny hamster who owns a tiny bar.
• A guinea pig nigiri.
• Batgirl/Supergirl adventures.

Thursday: Eh. At least it's almost the weekend.

Yes, that is bread inside of shoes.  No, I don't understand it either.

• Chipmunk.
• Squirrel.
• I would argue that "using the absence of competitors to charge extra fees" is the very definition of a monopoly.  When you use your position to extract rents above normal profits, you've stopped working in the public interest.  If we didn't have to deal with half the country being fucking morons, this kind of shit would get your board of directors sent to jail, and the rest of the company broken up.
• This is dumb.  They should have just let it go, and dealt with problems with, "yeah?  So?  Go fuck yourself."

Wednesday: Stupid supercomputer being stupid.

Wait, did the old Batman show not lie to me?  Was everything labeled with signs back then?

• Ghost/skeleton fight.
• I would use the stupid shop-specific size names if they were Charizard related.
• The second plot is most interesting.  The Republican political ads here have been pointing out how terrible the Hawaii heath exchange is.  It never really mattered, though, because Hawaii already mandated job related heath insurance, so the uninsured rate was low to start with.

Tuesday: I'm not saying that everything wrong with the world is due to old people, but...

I mean, some of these people seem like they might be young.  Not that old dude without sleeves, but still.

Lots of links today for some reason.

• This weekend is Kaguya weekend.
• Squirrel jack-o-lantern.
• Well.  Now I want to know how to make these.
• This is very much the story I had in my head when I heard the song, too.
• I'm still not a fan of the Civil War storyline, but the rest of this seems like a good plan.  An earlier Captain Marvel would be nice, although I suspect she'll show up for Avengers 3/part 1.  A two part Avengers 3 is kind of lame, as well.
• On the DC side of things, this is still the best thing they've done, and that was a decade or two ago.
• So.  You know.  If you want to know exactly which houses should be egged on Halloween.
• I saw this today, and used my very rusty Latin skills to note that "hatred of games" would actually be constructed using "ludus" as the base for games.  This would make the word they're looking for "misoludy."  I googled that, and discovered (along with three other people who show up for that search) that google wants to autocorrect that search to "Did you mean: milady".  It's like google was waiting to make that joke for weeks.

Seriously.

Monday: Mondays suck.

I think this cat is playing the easiest game of Tetris ever.

• The best part of this is that in the actual episode, everyone treated this guy and his two criminal friends as if they actually were the Powerpuff Girls.
• Batman.
• Bunny.

Sunday: Wait, where the fucking weekend go?

Oh yeah, I did that stuff yesterday, and then spent all day today doing errands and crap.  

"Damn it, cat.  I just asked you a simple question.  You don't have to be a jerk about it!"

• I decided to just search tumblr for yard sard last night.  This was the result.
• I never saw this followup that Sainbury's did change it to giraffe bread.
• Actual historical documents.

Saturday: This is apparently why I write all my own programs.

Because computer programmers are basically awful at everything.

Let's start at the beginning.  Julie mentioned a hack-mo-tron thing about asteroids last week.  I was reasonably sure that the math wasn't super difficult, and so after waking up today, I decided to sit down and see if that was true or not.  First, you need to see the diagram of things from wikipedia:

Then you need to note that the orbit is elliptical, and finally remember Kepler's second law.

And then you do math at it.

It's harder than I thought, mostly because step two doesn't have a analytic solution.  The methodology here is as follows.

1. First, work in a coordinate system in which the origin is at one focus of the elliptical orbit, and write down the equation for the distance to the orbit from that origin as a function of the true anomaly, listed here as theta.  Precalculate the integral of that because you need it later.
2. Next, we want to work in fixed (or at least known) time steps.  Therefore we need to know theta as a function of t.  The t here is actually (t_abs - t_perihelion) / period, in order to normalize it sanely.  Next, you do a bunch of calculus, and use the fact that the full area is swept out over one period to calibrate things.  This gives a mess that's effectively a constant for a given t, called kappa here.  This has to be solved analytically, but over the range [-pi:pi], there's only one non-trivial solution, so you can do a quick Newton method solution to find it.
3. Use the anomaly and orbital radius to write the vector U, which contains the (u,v,w) position in orbit coordinates.
4. Use R_omega to orient the orbit in real space using omega, the argument of perihelion.  This is just a simple spin.  Next, use R_Omega to handle the inclination, with Omega the ascending node and i the inclination angle.  This yields X, which is the (x,y,z) in a universal coordinate system.
5. Deproject (x,y,z) to (x',y'), because there is no decent 3d visualization code.

And this is where things become me bashing my head against fucking programmers.  I did the initial coding in octave, as after prototyping it, I could simply convert my scalar values to vectors and use the element-wise math in there to parallel a lot of orbits together.  Plus: built in linear algebra and function solvers.  Great.

Except generating a plot in octave in 3d is apparently ruled by the whims of lunatics.  The manual says you can call the axis() function to define the axes of the system, and if you specify "manual," that's retained.  However, every call to scatter3() seemed to reset to an auto set of axes, so even though I generated the thousand frames for my movie, since each frame had unique axes, it looks like shit.  No amount of dicking with the axes elements could fix this.

Ok.  So let's try perl.  Except Gtk is fucking stupid.  Just brain-numbingly "no, you have to do things this way, because there is no other way to do it."  Everything has to have a handler, and a caller, and they all have to be manually packed into other objects, and even then, getting an object you can draw to and clear...  Whatever.  Gtk is broken by design, and I hope the people who wrote it feel bad.

Googling points me to the GD library for perl.  Great.  Allocate an image object of size blah, fill with color whatever, draw to it in arbitrary fashions as you'd expect.  Wonderful.  And it has a 3d mode?  Excellent.

Except 3d mode can do lines, and curves, and polygons, but not a fucking point.  You can't just render a point in 3d space.

Fine, we'll do step five above, because it's functionally equivalent to the R_Omega transform.  You project to a new axis, and then dump the data that's not perpendicular to that axis, as it's just the depth information that you can't see in a 2d figure.  Not that bad of an issue.  

Let's check with a quick test to make sure things work.  There's even an animated gif output product so I can make the movie of the orbits directly.  But, because captain computer decided to increment the version from 2.0.xxx to 2.1.yyy such that yyy < xxx, and then included a check in the makefile that animated gif support is only available when xxx > 33, this doesn't work.  There's a bug report on it in ubuntu, but it hasn't been propagated to debian, so maybe install it from source locally, and fix the bug yourself, and then.

No.  Fuck it.  It shouldn't be my job to fix things because every damn computer programmer elsewhere can't adequately test their shit.  I'm reasonably sure my math is fine, but without a decent data visualization code, I can't check.

So I went and ate a burger and had some cheese tots.

• That would be my question as well.
• Shredded radish raccoon.
• I've linked to a yard sard thing before.

Friday: Donk.

You could totally get out if you wanted to, squirrel.

• Well, unless the cops are nearby.
• Yeah, panda wrangler.  You're probably not supposed to drop a baby panda.
• Ok, that's unexpected.
• I like how they're all serious and somber, and Totoro is just "RAAARRR!"

Thursday: Crunch.

Today was nearly super eventful.  I was driving home, and was behind a new SUV.  I could tell it was new as it still had a temporary license plate.  We got to The Worst Intersection Ever:

Manoa and East Manoa Roads.

We're travelling down East Manoa road towards the red dot in this story.  We stop at the intersection, and then the SUV starts going again, despite there being cars coming in the approaching Manoa road lane.  Those cars pretty much all slammed on their brakes, as did the SUV at the last moment.  I really thought I was going to have to call the cops to report a giant wreck.  The approaching cars had to swerve across the line to get past and onto Manoa road, and everyone eventually made it home safely.

But this is stupid.  This should be a damn roundabout.  There wouldn't even need to be that much construction.  Mohala way does cut all the way through to Manoa road.  It's dumb, but it's there.  If this was clearly signed as a roundabout, then traffic on Manoa road would all split onto the East Manoa road merge, people could turn onto Mohala or continue on East Manoa, or they could continue on the Mohala cut-through back to the continuation of Manoa road.  Simple, and it keeps traffic flowing, instead of forcing the traffic on East Manoa to wait for approaching Manoa road traffic.  I'm not sure there's another place in existence that would benefit from a roundabout more.

Except possibly the crap storm that is the Oahu/Manoa/Lowrey intersection.  It's a five way stop.  A five fucking way stop.  Roundabout.  There's enough road surface that it could again be added with minimal construction.

Then I got home, went all the way to my apartment, and found this note on my door.

"Please staff."  No.

It was super heavy.

This is a far larger book than I expected.

I'll have to read it when I finish the one I'm reading now.

• Team Rocket.
• Sure you can look at this stupid G.I. Joe gif, and think about dinosaurs, or you can note how absolute shit the animation was.  I saw this episode again in grad school, and it's just continuity and missing cell errors for 22 minutes.
• In case you forgot that Republicans are pretty much fascists who hate actual democracy.
• I would watch this movie.
• Of course, it's not available for android yet.  This is just another reason why I hate apple.

Wednesday: Argh.

This cookie was deceptively not as good as it appeared.

• Squirrels.
• Fluffy cat.
• I'm surprised this got by the editor.
• I'd never heard of Paul Cret before, but he designed a lot of cool buildings.
• I don't know what's going on here, but it's so absolutely stupid that the end result is really the only correct result.

Tuesday: Blah.

Show off.

• Somewhat concerning that Russian policy is being written by people who apparently live in a fantasy world.
• Baman Piderman.
• Barack Obama's hair, normalized against Morgan Freeman's hair.
• We should all thank Edmund Weaver for the discovery that made my job possible.
• Shit.  So I guess I'm going to spend the weekend upgrading my DVR.

Monday: Ugh.

• Cats are still dumb.
• Red pandas aren't particularly smart either, but they're way cuter.
• I haven't had a beef on weck in like 25 years.

Sunday: Never try new things.

"Wait, that's just ramen."

Yes, but I went with the spicy "word I forgot" style, which uses the kotteri base, but adds spicy stuff.  It's not as good as the kotteri. "Yeah, it's not as good as the kotteri," said the guy at the ramen place.  It's not bad, and it's not super spicy, but it does have a bit of a raw pepper flavor that I'm not much of a fan of.

I also saw this very happy spoon.  Keep being happy, happy spoon.

• Yeah, the original WW origin is far better.
• Cats are dumb.  Especially that cat on the chair.
• It's been more than a decade since I last played this game.  This is still a decent summary.

Saturday: Hurric-apocalypse!

Hurricane Ana hit today.  I was ready.

Hurricane water!

Hurricane pizza!

Hurricane fan!

Hurricane!

 Yeah. That's the hurricane.  Maybe it's hiding?

Nope.

This is what it looked like yesterday.

Here's the totally gratuitous blink between the two.

Basically, it turned out to be just a normal rainy day.

• I didn't like the links I had, so I'm just going to use pancake cat and be done with it. 

Friday: I'm pretty sure I won't even need to close my storm shutters for this hurricane.

"Am I doing all the music at this monster slaying?  Wait...why am I doing music at a monster slaying?  I don't think all these people are supposed to be here.  I don't think I'M supposed to be here.  Yeah, this all makes about as much sense as my instrument here."

• Piero di Cosimo.  He painted Perseus Freeing Andromeda.
• That's a stupid plan, Wonder Woman.  You too, Flash.  You both should know better.
• Why would you need 120 vaguely defined "star maps".  You can really only use one at a time anyway.
• The most important part of this is that Fatal Frame finally put in a character that could move faster than a dead turtle.

Thursday: Fine, this post just isn't going to have a title.

Or useful text, I guess.

Or a picture.

I do have links, though.

• I tried to look for tickets for Kaguya, since tomorrow is the scheduled release, and then this popped up in my RSS feed.  Halloween, then, I guess.
• Princess Mononoke.  And for later reference, that poster was gone today.
• This would be a good idea for a Teen Titans followup.
• Storm watch.
• No.