tyler florence, i kinda somehow love you even though technically you also make my skin crawl, but this has got to be the most ridiculous super bowl menu i've ever seen:
Charred Tomatillo Guacamole
Habanero Chile Salsa
Portuguese-Style Salt Cod Fritters with Lemon and Olives
Grilled Fat Pieces of Squid
Barcelona-Style Rice
i'm sorry, is that a super bowl, or a PRISSY BOWL?
The time has finally come: I'm getting rid of my car. Many of you probably don't even know I own one. That's intentional; like the deformed child you keep locked in the attic, I've hidden it from public view — despite a certain affection for it. It's best for everyone this way.
I bought it during my last year of college, after it turned out that the transmission on the van I had inherited was made out of branches stuck together with mud. The UVA newsgroups had previously delivered unto me a spectacularly ugly freezer that was now successfully dispensing keg beer in a corner of my living room, so I decided to give them another shot. They came through.
This used to belong to the wife of a Chinese grad student. She didn't speak much English and he wasn't the talkative sort, so I didn't get the full story about how the front-end damage originally occurred. All I knew was that I was broke and needed a car that would last for six months. For $450, the price was right.
Well, here we are — roughly four years later and the goddamn thing still runs. It's been sitting at my dad's house since I moved into the city, though, and suffering for the neglect. This year it failed its inspection (five months after it was due), convincing me that we should finally part ways. Besides, I had paid its purchase price twice over in insurance fees, its parking stickers were still coming from Charlottesville, and I had no idea where the DMV thought it was garaged. All in all, the process of renewing my registration seemed increasingly likely to result in jail time.
Also, there was this:
Some guy smashed my rear window in order to steal my bike about 15 months ago (note the safety glass in the backseat, which I have still not cleaned up). It turns out that windows — even small ones — are expensive. It would have cost about half the value of the car to replace this one — more than it cost when a rearview mirror epoxying-gone-awry forced me to replace the windshield.
So I called up WAMU and arranged to donate the thing. I briefly considered giving it to a worthier organization than effete and increasingly incompetent public radio programmers — Melwood* came to mind, since they're always angling for auto donations. But the car's exhaust leak seemed likely to only make their jobs harder. Also, I like imagining that I'm somehow putting Michael Feldman in danger.
So NPR it is. I'm just waiting for the call from the towing company that will arrange final pickup. But first I decided to strip everything of value from its interior — NPR shouldn't have to clean up my garbage, and I'd much rather give my stereo and speakers to a friend. I thought I was just going to find a bunch of rain-damaged papers in the trunk, but it turned out to be a treasure trove of college-era paraphernalia (not that kind). I was amazed at just how much awesome crap I had accumulated.
i found this washington post article about a small town in utah that supports bush nearly 100% simultaneously highly entertaining and highly condescending. basically, no one comes out of the piece - not the happily ignorant town residents, not the incredibly pompous-sounding author - looking good. i was especially bothered by the author's attitude that seemed to say that these people are not really living worthwhile lives.
how is anyone supposed to make people in a utah town of under 500 care about national and international issues? i'm not even sure that you can. but you probably shouldn't start with articles like this one.
please die. or sleep. or surgically turn your feet into marshmallows. WHATEVER IT TAKES I DO NOT GIVE A FUCK
update: for reference, previous noisy upstairs neighbor issues can be found here. and here. basically, i got four hours of sleep last night, even after kindly (AGAIN) asking dude to STFU. (i caught him barrelling his way down the outside stairs, taking out his trash at 12:30 am. WHO THE FUCK DOES THAT?) and could basically hear him roll his eyes from 30 feet away. whatever, neighbor man. i'm going to take your cats and rope them to your feet like fuzzy slippers. maybe then i'll get a little peace and quiet.
The cyberworld expands people's social networks and even encourages people to talk by phone or meet others in person, a new study finds.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project also finds that U.S. Internet users are more apt to get help on health care, financial and other decisions because they have a larger set of people to whom they can turn.
Further rebuking early studies suggesting that the Internet promotes isolation, Pew found that it ``was actually helping people maintain their communities,'' said Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociology professor and co-author of the Pew report.
The study found that e-mail is supplementing, not replacing, other means of contact. For example, people who e-mail most of their closest friends and relatives at least once a week are about 25 percent more likely to have weekly landline phone contact as well. The increase is even greater for cell phones.
``There's a certain seamlessness of how people maintain their social networks,'' said John Horrigan, Pew's associate director. ``They shift between face-to-face, phone and Internet quite easily.''
Meanwhile, Internet users tend to have a larger network of close and significant contacts -- a median of 37 compared with 30 for non-users -- and they are more likely to receive help from someone within that social network.
that's right. where you going to get your friends from now, ogged?
this study says that men find women who are witty to be a total turn-off.
guys: is this true? i would suspect that many of the guys who read this blog would say no, simply because i think most of the male readers here are the kind that appreciate humor and wit in a woman because they aren't insecure ninnies. but maybe not.
the article interviews a lot of female comedians about the study, but i don't think they should count as i find most stand up comedians to be kind of repulsive whether they're male or female. but seriously - if you met a woman out at a bar who could keep up a stream of hysterical repartee don't you think most people would consider that to be a turn on? or would it be seriously offputting? i mean, i just dunno. i don't see anyone throwing sarah silverman out of bed.
this weekend was more low-key, but i can still recommend the following:
the freaks and geeks dvd. tommy got me this for christmas, and i've been too busy to watch it until now but have spent a large chunk of saturday and sunday racing through. it's certainly charming, although i'm not sure why it inspired such cultlike devotion - it hasn't totally grabbed me in that way. but still very enjoyable, and i am now also in love with linda cardellini.
el tapatio on ashland. you know the night's going right when a) your supposed 45-minute wait to eat at a restaurant turns into 15 minutes b) the restaurant lets you sneak in your beers from the bar across the street that you were waiting at c) along with your pitcher of margaritas the waiter scores you each an extra glass full and d) even though your "burrito grandioso" weighs approximately four pounds, it's so good that you eat the entire thing.
guthries. we were supposed to hit up this bar on saturday night, but it turned out to be too crowded to stay there. but it looked adorable - small, cozy, with a fireplace and stacks of boardgames that people were playing at every table. perfect for a rainy night. if our group had been smaller, i would have been content to snag a table and hit up some monopoly. as it was, we headed to the first bar we came across on southport - cullen's, which was basically your typical faux-irish pub but was still fun. they actually had a decent cover band that played everything from radiohead to gin blossoms.
fudgy chocolate-raspberry bars. though fresh raspberries obviously aren't in season, the bars were still delicious and elicited raves from a dinner i went to sunday night. i was glad, because only god in heaven knows what a trial it is to bake in my postage-sized kitchen. my kitchenaid mixer? has to go ON THE FLOOR IN MY BEDROOM BECAUSE THERE IS NO WHERE ELSE TO PUT IT/PLUG IT IN.
not recommended: lazing out on your weekend run of 8 miles such that you have to do it monday morning before your 2 p.m. class, and now it's flurrying. sigh.
i panty-blogged, and apparently it's an unstoppable journey downwards after you've done that. but i need your help, dear readers (surprise surprise - can i ever make up my mind about something without consulting the blog?). i know it's january, but dammit, it's 55 degrees out, and i've been running past the lakefront beaches, and thus i am inspired to get a new bathing suit. plus i need some sweet shopping relief after all the work i've put into python today. lordy. but i can't decide between two, and tommy is no help. so if you don't mind, cast a vote:
or, trying to explain python to your hungover english major girlfriend:
pablohoney: functions look hard
halgernon: The words if then else and while all make sense in english
pablohoney: you say we already know one way to make variables contain mult values but i don't, what is it?
halgernon: Arrays are the way
pablohoney: oh yeah duh
halgernon: You could set different indexes in the array to the values you need to return
halgernon: Then return the array
pablohoney: that sentence makes no sense to me
halgernon: Ok, lemme rephrase
halgernon: If you had three values to return from a function
pablohoney: ok
halgernon: Like, let's say you had a LookUpShoe() function
halgernon: That you pass a model number
halgernon: And you want to return whether it's a mens or womens shoe, and the color
halgernon: You could say
halgernon: ShoeData = ['male','black']
halgernon: return ShoeData
halgernon: Make sense?
pablohoney: yes but i think my problem is that i dont understand programming at all
pablohoney: like where would y ou put that shoedata thing?
halgernon: It'll come back
pablohoney: i'm sure your tutorial is wonderful but i don't know if anyone with zero programming experience can understand it
pablohoney: at least, me
halgernon: That'd come in a function
halgernon: Yeah I was trying to walk a line between the programmers and new people
halgernon: But maybe I should take a step back and explain things more carefully
pablohoney: no, then you'd have to speak like you were talking to a retard
pablohoney: everyone else who is interested gets it fine i think
...
halgernon: Anyway, I think you will get it if you just ask questions
pablohoney: well you're nice to explain it to your girlfriend
halgernon: I appreciate that you want to learn my geeky stuff
halgernon: Seriously
pablohoney: it's HARD though
pablohoney: it's like a different way of thinking
halgernon: You'll get it, you're a brilliant girl
pablohoney: haha ok
halgernon: But that's the thing, once you get used to it it all snaps into place
pablohoney: this is coming from the girl who only got through high school senior computer science by manipulating the nerdy boy who sat next to her
halgernon: Well that option is still available
pablohoney: hehe
pablohoney: i can't have you cheat for me this time
pablohoney: i will learn python, goddammit
pablohoney: even if you constantly have to come up with shopping analogies to get me to understand
halgernon: I didn't do that to tailor it to you, actually
pablohoney: uh huh
halgernon: Shoes were just what came to mind
halgernon: And then I thought "shit, she'll think I'm being patronizing"
pablohoney: yes
pablohoney: but then i was like, ooh shoes
Alright! Let's do some programming. This is going to be kind of a long post, but it will (hopefully) include all of the basic concepts that you'll need to grasp in order to write a computer program. I'd suggest coming back to it a couple of times if you don't have the stamina to power through. I wanted to get it all out at once, though — I always find it frustrating to be given piece after tiny, useless pieces, patiently waiting until things start making sense.
first off, thank you for all your wonderful resume comments below. with your suggestions i was able to cut my resume down to a page and i think it is, to put it mildly, a LOT better. (though i am still conflicted as to whether i should stick in that agency internship. it is from 1999, but people find it fascinating for some reason, though i basically spent the entire summer a) hooking up with my co-intern b) copying departamental phonebooks).
anyway, i now have a cover letter question. a few sites i've been browsing recommend a newish form of cover letter - basically one tailored exactly to the job description. i mean, duh. but these say that you should create something akin to a table - in one column you would put the job requirements, and in the second corresponding slots you would put why you can handle that specific job requirement. make sense? it *sounds* interesting, and specific, and at least it would maybe catch somebody's eye, but i dunno...maybe too unconventional? what do you think?
if you know me, you know i check the sitemeter to this blog pretty obsessively. i'm not concerned with the number of visitors, but i love seeing referrals, ip addresses and where people are reading from. i have to say, we get residents of some pretty charmingly-named towns on a regular basis. recently? lake in the hills, IL; little neck, NY; cantonment, FL; saint cloud, MN; and i swear to god, one time we had something like "floating lily on the wood nymph, massachusetts." wish i could remember what it was exactly, but i'm basically sure all its citizens lived in a thomas kinkade painting.
something that has bugged me for, well, my entire life: why does ANYONE think it's EVER okay to disobey the sacred sidewalk/corridor rule and NOT walk on the right and pass on the left? i swear to god, it's getting out of control. coming home from my run today i was practically playing chicken with one guy who was walking towards me on the farthest right hand side (mine) and would not budge. i stuck to my guns, though, and he had to give way. that's right, motherfucker. don't mess with me when i'm strolling home.
hey folks. you are all brilliant, lovely, interestingly-employed people who know a thing or two about getting a job, right? well, maybe you could help me out. i seriously need to update my resume but i've always been terrible at doing so. there's a couple of jobs i'm putting feelers out for, and i want to pass around the shiniest, awesomest resume i possibly can. so in the interest of taking advantage of your vast knowledge, i created a resume writeboard. if anyone who is any good at these sort of things could take a look and perhaps make some edits, content or grammatical (wolfson, i'm looking at you), i would very much appreciate it.
i have to admit i think all this james frey stuff is kind of silly (though he comes off looking like an ass, i'd be surprised if book sales aren't rising - i see people reading a million little pieces constantly on the el nowadays), but this photo recap of his appearance on oprah is a) rather hysterical b) makes me want to go hide under my couch. oprah knows no mercy.
Or, morning roundup to write. And I was way too busy at work to write anything. But! Via stereogum, check out my beloved Attack of the Show making fun of Kevin Federline.
alright, my hipster friends. let's face facts: i'm going to be a lonely girl this summer. most of my friends will be in the d.c. headquarters of medill, doing a reporting quarter that i've opted out of because a) i am a sucky reporter and b) i plan on doing an as-yet-to-be-determined new media independent study. chicago is supposed to be lovely in the summer, but i am afraid i will be spending it sipping solitary gin and tonics on my balcony, staring wistfully off into the sunset.
but you, yes you, can change this potentially pathetic scenario by planning a visit to little old me. especially in light of the fact that it's just been announced that the second annual pitchfork ne intonation music festival will be taking place july 29-30. just think of it: wonderful indie bands, insufferable chicagoan hipsters, the magic futon...it all adds up to an unforgettable weekend.
This was projected on the outside of the YMCA tonight, as the radio station held an "open house" in the lobby. I really think I should get a discount on my membership dues for this. I go to the gym in an increasingly feeble attempt to feel like a badass. It's not going to help matters if my chosen location for manly endeavors starts trying to associate itself with John Mayer.
awesome: george michael and maeby of arrested development will guest star on an episode of veronica mars.
not awesome: not having any time to blog due to a) lack of wifi b) crazycakes goings on at school/work. be back soon, hopefully. maybe this afternoon, if this article doesn't suck ass and you are lucky!
Nicole points me to news that West Virginia is installing DDR in its middle schools in order to fight childhood obesity. Neat. I remember seeing the news of the pilot study last April, but I never suspected it'd result in an actual, widely-deployed fitness program. Lucky fat kids.
It's been on BoingBoing, and it's a few days old — but I didn't actually look at this Batgirl thing until tonight, and it's awesome enough that I feel compelled to blog it.
ALSO: via ScaryGoBlog, more LiveJournal webcomix goodness. MySpace:music::LiveJournal:cartoons?
Okay, not an ISO, really — I need the original disc. We're perilously close to successfully softmodding Kriston and Matt's Xbox. All we need is one of the flawed games that open the door to videogame mischief. Sadly, the local Blockbuster doesn't stock any of these (they're too old). So I thought I might as well ask here. If anyone in the DC area has a copy of MechAssault, 007: Agent Under Fire or the original Splinter Cell and wouldn't mind parting with it for an afternoon, let me know. It's got to be the original version, I'm afraid, not the edition released under the "Xbox Classics" brand. Thanks in advance.
this seems to me like an especially good and worthy use of the internet's social networking potential...besides the ability to find random sex partners, ride shares, couches for sale and the like.
all the free wifi connections in my apartment complex in chicago, which i had been stealing for the past four months, suddenly ran out yesterday.
it is a dire situation. i did not realize how much i loved the internet until now, coming up on my third hour in caribou coffee, where i am paying for the privilege to a) drink weak tea b) surf blogs and do homework. i love it so because i am subjecting myself to this pukehole of a fake log cabin, where i'm pretty sure i just heard the fourth different rendition of "i've got you uder my skin" in the past 45 minutes. either that, or i'm living in the matrix.
pray for me.
pablohoney: sigh, i am tired, but do not want to retreat to my den of no internet
pablohoney: i do not think i can live w/o the internet
pablohoney: it's one of the great love stories of our time
friend: wow sounds like it
friend: and yet, it just doesn't love you back
pablohoney: i know
pablohoney: ungrateful bitch
While Hemal was off galavanting around India, I took over DCist HR duties. This basically meant receiving a bunch of emails, replying to ask for writing samples, and gently letting people down when their proposed posts turned out to be thousand word screeds decrying political correctness (and not even political correctness in DC). Above all, I just had to keep track of everybody.
I managed to mostly not screw things up. Hemal, being a much sweeter and thoughtful person than is really necessary, brought me back some Indian candy as a thank-you. Specifically, stuff from Cadbury India.
The basic formulations were familiar — fruit-flavored hard candies; chewy toffees; chocolate bars — but the flavors were subtly weird. The pineapple was stronger, somehow. The toffee was more lactic. It was different, but good.
With one exception: the chocolate. Really, it's hard to convey how bad it was. One bite and you could taste the dismissive imperial prejudices of the original chocolatier. Clearly, Cadbury did not spend a lot of time fretting about quality control in its India division. I never knew that a candy bar could be so bad that it's actually racist.
friday night - gingerman tavern: a friend held her birthday party here, and it was a thoroughly adorable place. tiny, cramped yet cozy front room and an expansive backroom with a few pool tables and plenty of room to mill about. all sorts of people - yuppies, hipsters, plenty of medill graduate students - hanging out in perfect harmony. and extremely attractive male and female bartenders. probably a good place to get a drink before a show at the metro.
saturday afternoon - the chicago lakefront path: despite it having snowed a few inches the night before, the lakefront path was cleared and, refreshingly, empty. i had a great seven-mile run from the belmont harbor almost down to navy pier and back. the snow stretching to the lake was beautiful to look at and the weather was sunny and crisp. i thought i was being all hardcore, running out saturday in the cold, but while running i noticed a dude KAYAKING IN THE LAKE. that, my friends, is hardcore.
saturday night - mama desta's red sea: hooray, good ethiopian food! in september i had gone to some place called ethiopian diamond and found it truly lacking. i went on to assume in my haughty manner that no decent ethiopian food could be found outside of d.c. well, i was proved wrong when i went out to mama desta's with some friends. i should have gone earlier - it's just a few blocks up from my apartment, and is super delicious and mostly affordable. good honey wine, friendly service, jolly little atmosphere. no awesome singing and dancing a la dukem, but that's okay.
sunday night - peter's lasagna and viewings of west wing + grey's anatomy: you probably can't get your hands on the lasagna part (though i think this was the recipe he used), but i was totally excited to sit down for two hours last night and watch these shows. i haven't seen west wing in, oh, approximately a billion years, but i thought last night's episode was really good. of course, just as it starts getting decent again, it gets canceled. le sigh. as for grey's anatomy, well, that show just gives me the warm fuzzies. i don't think i've laughed so hard in a long time as i did at the hot dog eating scene. but that may have just been the five glasses of wine.
Sorry for not yet coming through on the next installment of our little Python how-to. Unfortunately, work has reared its head, and the time I'd set aside for writing it is getting eaten up by more pressing issues. But it's coming! Soon!
normally, knowing about negative two cents' worth of art, i leave all the linkage and commentary to the capps (happy birthday, by the way, old man! join my ancient ranks!). but i recently came across two photographers whose stuff is, i think, pretty awesome, so i wanted to put them here:
the bizarre/beautiful child portraiture of loretta lux
creepily fake-looking aerial photographs of cities and other structures by olivo barbieri (via waxy)
Sometimes I wonder what makes something funny. Back when I was reading and thinking about cognitive science all the time, I had decided comedy was based on your brain thinking it's figured out a pattern, then experiencing the completion of that pattern occur in an unexpected way. Sounds hilarious, right?
I still think that theory has some merit. But comic strips like this one make me think that the answer might be closer to "pointless cruelty."
Whatever it is, I think this clip from Strangers With Candy distills it pretty well.
I've got no particular reason for sharing this. I just thought of it the other day and felt like playing with video editing on the Mac. Go buy some Strangers With Candy DVDs, why dontcha?
BTW: video editing on the mac? Harder than I expected. Final Cut Pro is nice, and from what I can tell it seems easier than Premiere. But iMovie kind of sucks, and there doesn't seem to be a good, free, mid-level video converting tool like VirtualDub. I shouldn't have to download an entire pro-grade nonlinear editing suite just to extract a clip from a DVD and resize it. Bah!
It's been a while since I paid attention to music, but upcoming shows promise to change that. On the schedule: New Pornographers/Belle & Sebastian (if Matt still has a spare ticket for me); Hold Steady, maybe (sold out?); and Islands/Metric, apparently. The Tegan & Sara/Gogol Bordello show would've been attended but, well, I just learned about it today.
At the moment I'm most excited about Islands, the ex-Unicorns outfit. I loved the Unicorns, and the early Islands mp3s I've heard (particularly "Abominable Snowman" — although the Unicorns wrote that) seem promising. Plus Nick Diamonds did this, my enthusiasm for which you may already know. So I'm prepared to dub him "the good Unicorn" (there can be only one). You can find some Islands mp3s here. Also: I have just learned that the Unicorns' debut release is available for free here. Neat.
Back on track! The other enblogged act coming to town seems to be Stars. I've only started listening to that CD this week. Good songs, but I'm not sure I'm sold on them yet — their rhythm section is pretty weak when they're not using a drum machine. "Reunion" could've been great, but instead it only ends up being good. Maybe I'm projecting my crass predilection for Andrew WK-style cock rock onto the fully rendered craft of a sensitive auteur with no taste for bass. Or maybe they should hire a new drummer. Either way, the prospects for live rocking don't seem that great to me. But hey, I could be and probably am totally wrong. I'll be curious to hear folks' reactions.
Dante from the Black Cat was just on the usually banal Metro Connection outlining a consequence of the coming smoking ban that I hadn't thought about: crowds of smokers spilling onto the street between sets at his club. That seems likely to cause problems with the neighbors, who seem likely to raise a fuss, which seems likely to make DC an even more hostile place for our already scant rock club population. Drat.
It was nice to meet folks at the DCist happy hour last night. New blogger acquaintance A: Mari of In Shaw, who was very pleasant to talk to and whose blog I like a lot. I suspect she thinks I am a nice guy but also the type of person who's the problem with something. If so, she's probably right.
New blogger acquaintance B: Alex, who, at my prompting, explained to me what a NOP sled is. Awesome. If I'm going to have friends giving me irresponsibly large amounts of tech cred (terminologically, anyway), I'd better cultivate some contacts who actually know what the hell they're talking about. So I'm glad to have Alex in my RSS folder.
Also: Jacques newly-of-DCist, Wayan from DCMetblogs, and almost certainly a bunch of other new and charming and wonderful people whose names I can't remember. Plus, some usualsuspects. Always nice to see you guys.
The night ended confusingly, as Kriston, the Nabob and I talked about the old drink-a-gallon-of-milk-in-an-hour thing. I know it's impossible. We've all seen that episode of Jackass, and the N had conducted the experimental work himself in college. Kriston seemed to think that we east-coast types just don't know how to drink milk hard enough. And I wondered whether Lactaid could help someone win that bet.
So somehow we're now all supposed to try drinking a gallon of Gatorade in half an hour, some time. It doesn't make much sense to me — I think it's to remove the problematic milk from the equation. Too many independent variables! Remove the lactose! We're testing the effect of volume on drinking stuff. Hypothesis: regret.
It isn't really about competion, except perhaps against the dreary world that gave man such a pathetically weak digestive system. But it must be done. I guess.
one reason i love my very local chicago news station that i watch in the mornings: as i was getting out of the shower around 7:15, this is what i hear coming from the television:
"stacey, can you run the clip of the monkeys riding horseback?"
I've been meaning to link to it forever, so here it finally is: PayItForwardForward. Conceived of and executed by a duo with the two talents necessary for comedy: a love of abstract, high-concept nonsense; and a distinct lack of concern over breaking their poor mothers' hearts.
Windows
You have two options. The basic distribution of Python (2.4.2) is available here. However, there's also a free IDE (integrated development environment) available here. The latter option (ActivePython) is probably easier to work with, and doubtless has a lot of cool features. Let's go with that, why don't we.
Mac
OS X 10.2 and higher comes with Python pre-installed. You don't have to do anything — but I'd recommend that you go here, download the installer, and run it. For one thing, this will update your version of Python. For another, it will provide you with an IDE of your own (PythonIDE). More importantly, it'll provide a package manager, which will be important later.
Linux/Other
You guys probably know how to fend for yourselves. Source tarballs can be found here.
Testing It
Let's put together a Python program. I promised interesting applications, but it'd be a shame to skip past Hello World -- it's a rite of passage. Open up ActivePython or the PythonIDE and create a new file (File|New). Enter the following:
print "hello world"
It's hardly worth explaining, but I may as well: this single line calls the print function and passes it a string literal with the contents hello world. Don't worry about what a function is or what a string is or what a literal is (if you do know these things, feel free to feel smug about that fact). Just know that saying print "something" spits 'something' out to the screen, and that the quotation marks in the program aren't part of the output — in this case, they let Python know that it should treat the text hello world differently than it treats the text print.
Once you've got that entered (raise your hand if you're still working), save the file somewhere, then hit the "Run All" button in PythonIDE (Mac) or the "Check"/Little Running Guy button in ActivePython (Windows). ActivePython will pop up a "Run Script" box — just hit return.
The program should spit out the expected string in an output window (PythonIDE will create a new window; ActivePython sends output to the "Interactive Window" that should have opened when you started the program).
Astounding, isn't it? Well, don't worry, we'll be doing real programming soon. For now, just make sure that you understand how to create, load and save Python files — it's all done in exactly the same way as you'd manipulate documents in MS Word.
Also worth noting: these files are simply text files (usually with names ending in .py; that's just the convention). You can edit them in Notepad or TextEdit if you'd like, and run them from the command line by typing "python nameofprogram.py" (assuming you're in the same directory as the file, and the Python executable has been correctly placed in your path by the ActivePython or MacPython installer).
That's it for now. Next up, the meat of any programming language: variables, control structures and functions (not necessarily in that order). By the end of that lesson, you'll be ready to create some of the world's crappiest videogames. Let me know in comments if you had trouble with the installation or with Hello World.
the phrase "the laughter of squirrels" made me die of laughter earlier today, so i googled it. and who knew, there's a poem. about squirrels laughing. or a quote. or at the very least words strung together. i submit to you george arnold:
O sweet September, thy first breezes bring the dry leaf's rustle and the squirrel's laughter, the cool fresh air whence health and vigor spring and promise of exceeding joy hereafter.
writing about stuff at the gym made me think of this post of tommy's, about the squat rack, and dudes, and it is funny, so you should go read it.
it also made me realize i have not gone to spinning classes in god knows how long (i have been concentrating on the running), so you're all deprived of the heeeeesterical stories about godawful spinning music and biking aimlessly in the total dark. unfortunately, solitary running on the treadmill for 45 minutes at a time does not really lend itself to such tales. frankly, i'm too busy trying not to crumple up and die to observe anything going on around me.
except in the locker room. okay, let's take a poll: who gets utterly freaked out by all the naked people walking around? i mean, i'm not a prude. i mean, i am the complete opposite of prude. IN THE PRIVACY OF MY OWN HOME. can't we all just face the corner, change quickly, put on underwear while wearing the towel, basically exposing as little as possible of our flabby freckled flesh to the general populace? the younger women i don't mind so much (and no, not because of that, you sicko), but frankly i get completely weirded out by all the old naked ladies walking around. probably because, oh god, i will look like that one day.
except, i will live in the future by then, so maybe not.
my god. i've gone almost two days without blogging. something must be done.
........
.................
um.
ok, i have a gym question. why do women spend hours upon pointless hours doing ab work at the gym? when i go to the back room with the mats to stretch after my runs, the whole place is pretty much filled with ladies doing ab stuff on those big rubber balls; ladies doing weird crunchy things where they bring their legs up to their chests and point their arms out straight and wave them up and down very quickly. or else they are just holding the V position - legs slightly up, head up, arms pointed out straight, balancing on their butt and concentrating very hard.
this is stupid. for many reasons, but i will state two.
1. it ain't ever going to make a difference, unless you are an olympic marathoner/swimmer/etc.
2. women have bellies! we always will! embrace the buddha!
re: 1, i mean, seriously. seriously? seriously. you are not going to get a six pack or even any noticeable definition by doing lots of crunches. i'm speaking from personal experience, but the best way to get a somewhat-flatter stomach is to run a lot, on an incline, and just do a lot of cardio in general. i mean, a LOT. no matter how amazing the abs underneath are, women just have more fat on their stomachs and you will have to go to bizarre lengths to make it disappear. and why would you want to? i think rock hard abs on a woman are rather gross. they're a bit better on a man, but any time i see a guy with an extremely defined six pack, i think a) huh, that's kind of hot, but then b) about how much time he must have to spend at the gym. and how little time he must spend drinking beer and eating barbeque.
and that, my friends, makes me think.
that's catherine's gym wisdom for the day. you're welcome.
I'm sorry that the tutorial has been slightly delayed. The first entry has been living happily in Movable Type for a few days now, waiting for me to find time to test its contents on a Windows machine. Sadly, travel, work and Belgian beers have gotten in the way. Tonight looks to be pleasantly uneventful, though. I should be able to put something up this evening.
I hope I'll see the lot of you at the DCist happy hour tomorrow. It's sure to be mind-blowingly awesome for vast array of reasons, none of which I can articulate.
Sadly, I'm on morning roundup duty for Friday, so the traditional happy hour spectacle of watching me get drunk and embarrass myself won't be available. Maybe next time.
my flickr contact mafaldablue posted a beautiful set of photos of matera, which is one of my favorite places in italy. it's the cave town. you can read some info i've wriitten about matera here, and see some photos i took here (captions include "you've got dead monk on your ass," so you know it's worth it).
sigh. well, tommy is back safe and sound in d.c., and i just went on an hour and a half cleaning spree to keep the bad sad feelings at bay. still, though, we had a pretty great weekend. it followed the trend of us being ENORMOUS GLUTTONS every time we spend any time together since i moved to chicago. we like to eat out a lot, so when we have the chance, i guess we just go on an enormous eating out binge to make up for all the other times i, as a poor graduate student and he, as a tired web programmer, end up eating lousy dinners at the end of the day. mmm, mac n cheese!
luckily my neighborhood gives us a lot of delicious eating options. i imagine my following recommendations are old hat to anyone who's lived in chicago for a decent amount of time, but if you're new to the area, maybe they'll help you out. you can find addresses and more info at metromix.com.
I've been meaning to post this for a while: ptunnel is an application that allows you to tunnel internet traffic over ICMP pings. Allow me to explain why this is cool.
Pings are the simplest way of testing connectivity over the internet. They're part of a protocol called ICMP that's used for diagnostic purposes and little else. Ptunnel reimplements TCP/IP b— the internet's main protocol — by tacking your messages' content onto the end of pings. You run a server on another machine that receives the tunnelled packets, converts them to normal internet traffic, sends them out, gets a response, and sends it back to you over the ICMP tunnel.
Why is this useful? Mostly, it's not. But ICMP is frequently the only thing that can get through airport/coffee shop-style wifi hotspots prior to purchasing time with a credit card. ICMP traffic is allowed through because doing so makes service technicians' lives easier. Now that fun fact can make your life slightly cheaper.
I haven't tested it myself, though. The problem is that you need to run ptunnel on a server that can receive ICMP — and most consumer routers aren't designed to let you forward ICMP traffic from the internet to machines on your LAN. I suppose I could make my linux server the network's DMZ host, but that would result in all incoming TCP traffic getting through, as well. Given the lousy passwords I have on my mp3 shared directories, that's not a great idea. Besides, even with a DMZ set I'm not sure that the router wouldn't just answer the incoming pings itself.
Maybe I'll try to get ptunnel running on the router itself — it is a Linux machine in its own right, after all. It would be pretty fun to see if Starbucks can be beaten this way.
Via DCist I see that Butterstick now has his own wikipedia page. Neat! The only problem: the Bandit the Panda people have added their own editorializing. "Bandit is also a popular name for the panda"!? Please. You're going to make people think wikipedia isn't trustworthy!
To be honest, I'm not incredibly keen on getting drawn into a juvenile wikipedia fracas, and probably wouldn't have responded if not for one thing that particularly galled me: the Bandit people constructed a sentence grouping the two t-shirt stores together, and listing an aggregate sum of money raised for the zoo. For the record, cafepress.com/bstick stands at just under $2k donated to FONZ. How much Bandit merchandise has been moved, I wonder? Well, I couldn't help myself, and adjusted the wikipedia sentence to break out the individual store totals. I'd encourage them to provide their own details.
I'll happily admit that this is embarrassingly juvenile. But I can't help myself. As I said before, I don't begrudge anyone the right to conduct their own stupid internet fad — all I'd ask is that they refrain from stealing from mine.
so, this facebook.com thing. i'm doing it. sort of. i became aware of facebook's existence a couple of years ago when my brother, then still an undergraduate at UVa, talked about it. i basically got out of it that it was a friendster for college kids, which sounded fun, but SO BELOW wise old me.
well, now that i am a graduate student, and many of the people in my class happen to be fresh-outta-college kids who are facebook connoisseurs, i have been forced to create a facebook profile in order to appear hip and not-ancient and to maintain my new media internets cred. it is hard, but i am doing it. but generally, i don't understand why facebook is so popular, except that you can stalk people...which you can do with any social networking site. why do college kids prefer it over friendster? maybe because friendster sucks balls and is clunky and cluttered and difficult to use? hmm. maybe. facebook's design and features are pretty slick, i'll give it that - i especially like the photo album/upload features (though flickr is still superior to any photo features any site has going on). i guess its main appeal lies in the school affiliation. undergrad loyalty is a super-strong theme, and facebook takes advantage of that. beyond that, i don't really see a huge difference between it and friendster or myspace. but please, god, don't make me have to create a myspace profile, too.
for those who have a college email, you can access my facebook profile here.
i'm sitting in a coffee shop in lakeview with tommy right now (he had to work today, so we're taking advantage of the place's free wifi, and i don't have class till 2). i'm sipping coffee and browsing this facebook thing (post on it and how i am seriously an old lady to come later).
two construction guys from a site next door walked in to get coffee and are sitting down at a nearby table. one of them has a ringtone. not just any ringtone. the WORST RINGTONE ON THE FACE OF THIS EARTH. it is "shake dat laffy taffy." it is on at an abominably loud volume. it has gone off no less than four times in the 15 minutes he has been there. and he takes his sweet time answering it.
just wanted a record for posterity of how my first-ever homicide will be justified.
i'm not really the panty-blogging type of internet folk, but i recently have been consumed by a weird and all abiding bizarre love for a type of underwear, so much that so that i am actually motivated to write about it on the internets, because OTHER LADIES MUST KNOW ABOUT THE FABULOUSNESS of this underwear.
they are the ultra low pure cotton hipster from gap. they are comfy, flattering, low-rise enough such that they don't peek out over your jeans and, most importantly, cheap. so. yeah. there's my undewear recommendation of the day. go forth and purchase.
cannot believe am writing about underwear on the internet.
Alright, let's get things started — or at least planned. As I mentioned in a previous entry and in comments, I'm going to try to put together a concise set of posts aimed at getting users with no programming knowledge up to speed at doing cool things on and to the internet. I'm hoping to end up with something that would've suited my fourteen year-old self perfectly. This post will outline what I intend to do and why I'm going to do it. It'll ramble on for a bit, but the actual tutorial is going to be as concise and clear as I can make it.
I'm going to do this in Python, mostly because I don't know the language and would like an excuse to learn it. But there are non-selfish reasons for the choice, too:
It's So Hot Right Now
Google loves Python. Adrian Holovaty loves Python. Everyone loves Python. It's not the only trendy language at the moment (see also: Ruby, C#). But rest assured, there are tech managers out there right now who would be impressed to see Python on your resume (frequently despite not actually knowing what it is).
It's Cross-Platform
There are good implementations for OS X, Windows and Linux. You should, in theory, be able to take a program from one platform to the other and have it Just Work. And there are tools available for each that'll let you produce native standalone applications, letting you run your programs on computers where Python isn't installed.
It's Got The Most Dirty-Joke-Friendly Name Of Any Programming Language
Taking the crown from LISP, I suppose.
There's one big downside, though, that's worth pointing out:
It Uses Weird Syntax
Many languages have adopted a syntax similar to what's used in the C programming language. You could look at a Java, C++, C#, ECMAScript or even Perl snippet of code and not be able to tell what language it was written in. That's not the case with Python — unlike those other languages, it relies on whitespace (e.g. tabs, spaces and line breaks) to determine how things work. That's unusual, and it means you'll probably have a slightly harder time learning your second programming language if Python is your first.
Here's the outline I've got in mind:
Installing Python And Making Sure It Works
Variables, Control Structures And Functions
Regular Expressions and File Input/Output
Interacting With Websites
Putting It All Together To Do Something Cool
Finally, I should note that there are a ton of other Python tutorials out there — I haven't completely gone through Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python, but if it's as good as his GreaseMonkey book, I can highly recommend it. When things don't make sense or you want to go in a new direction, you should look through some of the material linked from python.org. This will almost certainly not end up being the best tutorial out there; my hope is just that it'll be one of the most pragmatic. And, of course, we can deal with questions in the comment sections.
that's right, folks: the two articles i wrote last week for my legal affairs reporting class? the two genius pieces on samuel alito? they were sent out over the wire to our client papers and i received the honor of being published in the...(wait for it)
NORTHWEST INDIANA TIMES!
literally dozens of people have now read my name in print! HOORAH.
i might be sorry later that i admitted this, but i think "beauty and the geek" is possibly THE BEST TELEVISION SHOW EVER. certainly, the most quotable. tommy and i have been laughing hysterically while watching it for the past 15 minutes. highly recommended.
Wow. Let me register a ringing endorsement for Extreme Aerialists. THAT is the type of fluff I expect from the Discovery Channel — not that gastric bypass nonsense, or investigations into how aliens built the pyramids. When two separate videos of men falling to their deaths aren't the most memorable parts of a TV show, you know it's got to be pretty amazing.
will there be one single bar in the chicago area that will be showing the redskins game? i don't care if it's on the corner 1950's tv in black and white. i want my booze+football!
I've been a pretty lame blogger this week. That's largely because I've been a pretty lame human being — I've had some sort of nasty whiplash-ish condition as a result of my bike accident, and only yesterday arrived at a painkiller dosing schedule that made me less than constantly cranky. I'd like to issue a personal shout-out to the people who make mobic, by the way. A doctor gave me some samples for a sore back a while ago. They didn't do anything for my back, but I stumbled across the leftovers last night and MAN do they fix my neck. Thanks, evil pharmaceutical industry!
But I've got plans, internet. Plans that involve you. What would you say to a programming tutorial aimed at the non-programmer? You'd be pretty goddamn excited about it, I bet. I'll be trying to keep things simple and short, with an emphasis on doing cool internet-y things quickly. Like stuffing the ballot box of online polls. Or having your computer text-message you when concert tickets go on sale. I'm still working out the outline in my head, but I think I can get everyone equipped to work some useful HTTP/regex mojo in just 4 or 5 lessons. That'd be worth knowing, right? Right.
But tonight, I'm off to Chicago. So for now I'll just direct you to the anecdote at the end of this post from my sister.
you know you need more coffee (and you've been reading too much dooce.com) when you read the headline "man who shot pope freed" as "man who shot poop freed."
i barely ever read the horoscopes, but i do like those once-a-year ones that say if blah-and-blah is your birthday (because they're always nice. what astrologist is going to say, if this is your birthday, you are doomed to sadness and despair and dead kitties?)...here's mine:
TODAY'S BIRTHDAY (January 11). You dare to dream big, and therefore you break through your past limitations. Your birthday rockets you into an era of increased confidence and self-esteem. Love flows to you because you know you deserve it! A part-time enterprise makes a huge difference to your finances next month. Scorpio and Sagittarius people bring out your passion. Your lucky numbers are: 9, 3, 20, 25 and 35.
a part-time enterprise? either i will a) start freelancing or b) start hookering, because the way things are going this quarter, i'm not going to have enough time to do my laundry, let alone enterprise in any other manner.
How is it that I haven't heard of gumstix before? Linux machines the size of a stick of gum that run off of 5V power supplies... wow. One of those suckers + wifi expansion + AirSnarf + clever concealment at a wifi-enabled cafe = all kinds of mayhem. You can get a lot done with 200MHz.
My interview with the Shmoo Group is up on DCist, if anyone's interested in reading it. Their DC-based convention kicks off on Friday. I would've loved to have gone (esp. after they offered me a press pass so I wouldn't have to shell out hundreds of dollars). But this weekend I'll be in Chicago instead, having an even better time (albeit a slightly less nerdy one). Oh well — next year, I guess.
somebody should take this nyt article about the dynamics and lives of the transient inhabitants of a nyc apartment building and apply it to an internet community, like the commenters over at unfogged or making light or an IRC channel. i participated once in an IRC channel that had twice the drama of these people. they like to party? they sleep with each other? they live above a cupcake shop?! PSHAW. you weren't seein nuthin until you were spending four hours a day on the dalnet radiohead channel (not the "official" radiohead channel; the supercool secretish one) that i was when i was 17. the drama was beyond belief: deep and, i assure you, seriously intellectual conversations; rampant flirting; backstabbing when ops stole control from other ops and banning was raging. all set to the sounds of "ok computer" and "the bends." MADNESS, PEOPLE. madness.
and thus my nerd roots are revealed. as if they hadn't been multiple times before.
over at unfogged, some comments in this thread are talking about undue pressures that kids as as young as 5 and 6 are facing. i don't have anything particularly enlightening to say about that, but it reminded me of a period when i was teaching at ASM (i taught 5-8 year olds, and, as another note, i did teach in milan, where most children wore armani for kids for picture day at school, and yes, i am being literal). i know you're not supposed to have favorites as a teacher, but, hell, i was only there for a year, and i was pretty much in love with florentia, a five-year-old from argentina who hadn't yet lived in once place for more than one year of her short life (her father was a diplomat of some sort). she spoke spanish, russian (her family's previous stint had been in moscow), english, and was rapidly picking up italian. at 5 she was already a near-fluent reader, and making up totally awesome stories about magical dolphins. being kind and funny and open, she was very popular amongst her classmates.
then one day at lunch, i noticed she wasn't eating anything, and i asked if she was feeling well.
"i'm fine," she said, pushing around her food. i didn't believe her (a bug had been going around in class and basically i was afraid she was about to vomit up a storm) so i pushed her to tell me what was going on. she said that her mother had told her she had needed to lose weight, so she couldn't eat her lunch.
i about blew a gasket (not in front of her) and went to talk about it with my much wiser and more experienced supervisor, who ended up speaking both with florentia and her mother about the situation. it was towards the end of the school year, and i left italy in july, so i'm not sure what the outcome ever was.
anyway, one piece of advice i took away from my much wiser and more experienced supervisor, who really was a brilliant teacher of young children, was to never, NEVER comment on a child's appearance. i thought that was obvious when it came to things like weight or odd features or glasses, but she meant absolutely nothing. not even if the child looks pretty/handsome. it seems innocuous and even encouraging at the time to tell a little girl that she looks very pretty that day, or that you love her shirt/skirt/hairstyle, but at such a young age it merely enforces weirdness about a) fashion b) appearances and c) teaches children that you can get positive reinforcement for something so stupid as what you're wearing - which, of course you can. but it's entirely freaky to think that there are five-year-olds out there realizing and exploiting that fact.
i generally think it's pretty hysterical when children are mistakenly served alcohol, but this particular article takes the cake:
An Applebee's restaurant in New York City gave a 5-year-old boy a beverage he won't be able to drink legally for another 16 years. The boy's mother is taking Applebee's to court.
Cynthia Pereles can't understand how someone put Long Island iced tea into her son Seth's kiddie cup instead of the apple juice he ordered.
Seth took two sips and immediately spit it out, but then he couldn't stop laughing and started licking bread baskets.
funny, when tommy gets drunk, that's exactly what he does too!
Back in the good ol' days (mid-2005), when Catherine blogged a blue-streak for DCist and I simply basked in her local media aura, I was dismissive of her complaints about commenters on that site. "You're too sensitive," I would say. "They're just feeding their own egos."
This was and is true, but now I've completely lost my disinterested moorings. Today I made a really, really stupid mistake, accidentally posting something that said the Washington Times owns the DC Examiner. It was an easy mistake for me to make. Excellent sports section? Check. Red masthead? Check. Unseemly interest in deporting hispanics? Check. All the pieces fit. But somewhere along the line I got my megalomaniacal conservative media moguls confused. It was dumb of me.
To be honest, the commenters today treated me far more fairly than my boneheadedness warranted. But it's all relative — these are people who have expressed a wish for my best friend to get AIDS (that one was totally his fault, though). I wonder if Marc Fisher gets socked in the face by random passersby on the street.
i'm sorry: i know chicago is a culturally aware town, and the orchestra is very important, etc, etc, etc. BUT. the orchestra's REHERSAL is NOT MORE IMPORTANT THAN RADIOHEAD PLAYING TWO DATES AT MILLENIUM PARK. not to think of the sort of revenue that it would bring in.
i've got a compromise: let the orchestra back radiohead on those two dates. they're getting into all sorts of bizarre classical shit, and the orchestra could learn some new tunes. fun times all around!
long shot, but if anybody out there has an invite to newsvine.com, i would love, love, love to have one.
UPDATE: yay! thanks to mike, both tommy and now have accounts, so presumably i can invite other people. let me know if you want one. you can read cyberjournalist's take on newsvine here.
i guess the mental punishment of graduate school isn't really enough for the sadomasochistic likes of me, because i, for whatever reason, just registered for the 2006 national half-marathon taking place in d.c. on march 25 (i'll be home from school from the 18th to the 26th, and it's not like i'd rather spend time with my loved ones or relaxing or anything. i'd much rather be turning my feet into bloody stumps).
the race is the first half-marathon in the area, i believe, so i'm excited about that. i'm also excited that i was able to register at all, because, in a weird move, they actually have qualifying times. i thought at first i wouldn't be able to do it because you needed to have run a marathon in 4:30, and when i did the marine corps marathon in 2004, i ran something like 4:34. but, lo and behold, you can also qualify by having run under 2:10 in a previous half-marathon or under 1:40 in a 10 miler race, both of which i've done. so. yay.
my last official race was the 2004 marine corps marathon so i am, how do you say, woefully fat and out of shape and terrified by the fact that i will have to self-train for this stupid race. previously i've always had friends to train with or an official program. the past couple of months i've been running four miles a few times a week pretty regularly, just to work out, but training for this will obviously have to go beyond that.
additionally, any chicagoans who have insights about race training/running paths, please fill me in - i can train to a certain point up on a treadmill, but i can't exactly see the staff at the gym being thrilled with me running on a treadmill for two hours at a time. oh my god. i just realized my main training will have to take place in january and february, outside, IN CHICAGO. PROBABLY ALONG THE LAKEFRONT. I AM MENTAL.
excuse me while i go run five miles to quell the rising self-doubt.
not having received any redskins games on my crappy broadcast tv since i moved to chicago (except their very first one of the season when they played the bears), i neglected to even think about the possibility that i might get the tampa playoff game. so even though i knew when the game started today, i didn't think twice about making plans to go see "match point" this evening instead. of course, as soon as i get out of the shower, i flip on the tv, and what do i see except the redskins kicking ass and taking names (at least in this quarter; god, please let that continue, i will, like, go to church and help old people cross streets and save kitties if you let them keep this up). so i'm about to head out to the movie, but i'm wearing my red and gold pumas. and chanting "hail to the redskins" in my head for the next few hours.
digging through my wallet today, i noticed a funny-looking penny (i've started paying closer attention to my change since i keep getting screwed over by somehow amassing a large amount of canadian quarter-looking coins that don't work in my laundry machines and force me to run back to my apartment every time i do a load to get a real quarter). the penny is from 1944 and is what the internet says is a "wheat-backed" penny.
it's probably a pretty common coin, but i thought i'd ask the blogosphere: could this penny actually be worth something, or is it just a neat old coin?
It's January. STOP WATERING YOUR FUCKING LAWN, YOU STUPID BITCH. THANKS TO THE EVER-PRESENT PUDDLE OF STANDING WATER AT YOUR INTERSECTION, I WIPED OUT ON MY BIKE TONIGHT.
Somebody headed in the opposite direction stopped to make sure I was okay, which was nice. Also nice: the helmet I was wearing, which I felt impact the pavement. But my knees are bloody, my bike is fucked up, and I am not happy. It's not getting any greener, dumbass. If there had been a car behind me, I wouldn't have the luxury of whining on the internet. How about we just knock off the perpetual water-wasting, mkay?
a waterproof laptop. seriously. i really could have used that while taking a bath tonight. could have done some work, could have done some blog commenting...instead, i suppose i made do with a beer and a crossword and my ipod speakers dragged to the door of the bathroom (and a few drops of this in the water, which makes your skin SO AWESOME SOFT). but, really. this is an untapped market.
get on it. i will pay you a gazillion dolllars. or the two dollars i currently have in my wallet.
When I see an article on Slashdot with a title like "Warp Drives In Development", I automatically assume it's there because of editorial incompetence or as comment-inducing flamebait. I mean, yes, I remember from that one Star Trek movie that there was this guy who was going to invent the warp engine, but he was an alcoholic so time travelers had to yell at him to get his shit together (step 2 of 12). And I agree, it was the closest Star Trek has ever come to a so-called character arc, and therefore the greatest piece of drama ever, and therefore entirely plausible. But that doesn't mean engineering schools are going to start offering Advanced Nacelle Design anytime soon.
But it turns out that the physics behind it maybe, possibly, could be for real. Obviously I'm in no position to seriously comment, being a total moron at physics. But a new paper on the underlying theory won a "Best Paper of the Year" award from these guys, who are apparently reputable. And the DoE and DoD seem committed to sinking some money into testing the underlying science (they've done the same for cold fusion, of course). But most importantly: the backstory to the theory is incredibly entertaining. The theory ain't bad, either.
As this comment explains, the idea is that a sufficiently massive torus of matter rotated in a strong magnetic field deforms spacetime on one side of the torus, exerting a force that'd pull the whole contraption along. More importantly, physics magic means that, given a strong enough effect, the speed of light could be exceeded. In order to avoid violating general relativity, this happens by slipping into another dimension. Which is awesome.
This is all based on Heim Theory, a GUT put together by Burkhard Heim. As I said, all of this stuff is over my head, but Heim's story is fascinating. First and foremost, the dude had no hands. That's right, handless. He lost 'em in an explosive-handling mishap when he was working in a Nazi munitions factory. Right there: two strikes in his favor. First, it's clear that within the world of science more hands = more distractions. Just look at the scholarly output of Dr. Octopus — the man is an academic laughingstock. Second, everybody knows that Nazi scientists are tops when it comes to producing diabolical, earth-shattering science on a shoestring budget. If you need a lot of gorilla cyborgs for not a lot of money, you know who to call.
That explosion also left Heim blind and mostly deaf. He couldn't work in a collaborative setting — his handicaps were too much of an impediment. He holed himself up and worked on his theory, terrified of plagiarists. He only ever published one paper, at the urging of a friend. Finally, decades later, he tried testing it. With the assistance of other researchers, the theory was plugged into a computer. From its first principles, the masses of the elementary particles were calculated, and matched up very closely with experimental observation. Apparently this is a big deal.
But even though Heim died several years ago, the bulk of his work seems to still be in the process of being chewed over by the scientific community. It's all in German and uses some pretty nasty calculus, presumably just to be difficult. I guess I'd be in an antagonistic mood, too, if my hands were blown off. Also not helping attract scholarly sympathy: Heim was embraced by UFO crackpots. It sounds like he tried to keep his work separate and reputable, but didn't entirely eschew their company.
Of course I clearly shouldn't believe everything I read on Wikipedia, and I should believe even less of what I read on Slashdot (you should believe none of what you read here). But c'mon — we're talking about a handless, blind, deaf, reclusive ex-Nazi scientist. I can't comment on the physics, but this theory is clearly biographically sound.
Wow. I don't watch a huge amount of college football, but that was one hell of a game. I bet Kriston wasn't feeling any pain around 1AM. In fact, I know he wasn't.
Also entertaining: hearing, through my bedroom wall, Charles wake up to answer his cellphone. You've gotta turn that shit off on bowl night, my friend.
For those interested: the billion tutorials are right. Skype + SoundFlower + SoundFlowerBed + Audacity = ability to record phone calls (on the Mac -- it ought to be easier on the PC, actually). Finding and getting the LAME MP3 library installed is surprisingly confusing on OS X, though. Here's the link you need.
another day, another terrifying start to a hapless quarter at the medill school of journalism. this quarter promises to be a wee bit harder than the previous one. i've got three classes: new media storytelling, wherein i will learn how to make stuff for this "internet" thing; a legal RPA (reporting on public affairs) and a seminar to accompany the RPA.
when choosing amongst the urban, econ and legal RPA last quarter, my thought process went something vaguely like this: don't you dare do urban, because you know if you do, you are going to succumb to the arts & culture sub-beat, which you just had last quarter, and anyway, you've been reporting arts & culture stuff since you were, oh, five. LEARN NEW SHIT. hmm, econ? hmm, numbers? hmm, no fucking way? okay, legal. there we have it. reporting by process of elimination.
what makes it even worse is that now i will be reporting for Real News, instead of just submitting articles to my kindly instructors for a grade in class. we've got the medill news service, which sends out dozens of articles every day to local publications, with a hearty number of them getting published, fo' real. so my legal reporting this quarter promises to be entertaining for everybody involved: for my instructors, who will no doubt snicker at my astounding lack of knowledge of our fine legal system; for you all, as i recount errors after hysterical errors, possibly ending in jail time for me and my wackily libelous articles; and for me, because this entire process can only increase my alcohol input.
so, yeah. if you've got knowledge of the law, or tips, or bourbon, lemme know. fun times, fun times.
Sommer falls in love with Roller Derby, and reminds me of my own favorite stupid pseudosport: SlamBall. Sure, it sounds dumb. But I've never seen a sport as gleefully, accidentally brutal. It seemed like SlamBall's fate would be decided by which happened first: achieving popularity, or its first high-profile spinal injury. The odds looked good.
Sadly, someone made some stupid business decisions and my beloved SlamBall went away. But lo! What light on yonder trampoline-filled basketball court breaks?
Apparently, the sport isn't totally defunct. Some dopes even think the future looks bright for a EuroSlamBall league. I'm trying not to get my hopes up, but it's tough.
Belatedly going through some predictions for 2006, I realized that *I* had stupidly made some predictions last year. And hey, they turned out pretty well (although my batting average in the "science" category was weak). But this year, I got nothing. Well, okay, there's this: total entropy in the closed system of your choice will not — I repeat, not — decrease.
There. I've put myself out on a limb. Anybody else got guesses about what aught-six will bring?
You really, really shouldn't wear that Under Armour shirt you bought yourself to the gym until you're sure you can pull it off. How will you know when that is? When you're selected in the NFL draft, fatass. Now quit using the squat rack as a towel rack.
Bunnie Huang, the man commonly credited with cracking the Xbox 1, has some things to say about the burnable XB360 disc I wrote about last week. Nothing particularly new, but he summarizes the exploit approaches that were being suggested — and offers some expert confirmation that this burnable disc is a track worth pursuing.
If one wanted to — hypothetically — help set up his mom with DirecTV, and he hypothetically had a spare hypothetical satellite receiver, and her house already boasted a DirecTV dish, could he just activate the receiver @ $5/month on his account and plug it in for her? Or is there something that ties the receiver to the dish (the hypothetical one)? Remember kids: cable theft is a real and serious crime, even when there's no cable.
I'm interviewing someone from the Shmoo Group for DCist, so if anyone has anything intelligent they'd like to ask them, let me know.
I haven't made any resolutions for the new year. For one thing, I think I'm perfectly delightful as-is. For another, I haven't been doing too well at tackling the items on this list. My gym-going has fallen off. I haven't been to a single Wizards or Caps game. And Kriston and I have temporarily shelved our plan to take a martial arts class while we investigate the legalities that will arise when we (inevitably) accidentally kill dudes with our bare hands.
But on December 21*, I finally got started on one of my goals: I began growing a beard. It was the last day of work before days off and a week of telecommuting, and we were going to be spending it moving the office. I would have two solid weeks to cultivate a respectable beard before I'd be in front of anyone who I wasn't prepared to have laugh at me. "It's beard time," I thought. "Let's beard it up."
By the weekend, things had taken a turn for the worse. It itched like a motherfucker, and I couldn't find an unguent or ointment that'd fix the problem. Also, I was unclear about how high up my neck I was supposed to shave — the line kept creeping upward, but I was terrified of ending up looking like that dope from Limp Bizkit (any of them). I voiced my misgivings to Kriston and Matt, my personal beard advisors. It was around midnight on Christmas Eve. We were in the Red Room, helping ourselves to some cheap domestic holiday cheer.
"No, dude! You've gotta stick with it. You're doing great. It's coming in really well!"
I knew they were lying, but I appreciated the sentiment. They seemed to view beard-growing as an important voyage of personal discovery. And, not having been through that looking glass myself, who was I to argue? I tried to take heart.
"Well, I guess I'll stick with it. Catherine has been really supportive, after all."
They fell silent, refusing to meet my gaze, their faces lit only by their cigarettes and the pinball machine's grim effulgence.
"She'll turn on you," warned Matt, his eyes still locked on the beer in his hands. It was becoming clear that this beard business was more serious than I thought.
But the itching passed, and I began to enjoy my new pseudo-beard. Bike rides were less cold, for one thing. And I was saving a fortune on shaving cream, presumably. The possibilities seemed limitless.
But it's been almost two weeks, and it's time to face up to reality. Here's the current state of the beard:
By way of comparison, here's what I had in mind. I've bearded as hard as I can, but I am still orders of beard magnitude away from my goal. I feel confident that, with enough time, most of the weak spots could be hidden with a skilled facial hair combover. But the area directly under my nose — yeesh. Still perfectly hairless. It looks like it'd take an entire second adolescence to get that patch going, and frankly I'm not prepared to resume spending that much time in Jeff's parents' basement.
So that's it for me. Maybe I'll try again in a few years. But in a couple of hours the facial hair is coming off. Besides, according to my pre- and post-holiday weigh-ins, this damn thing weighs seven pounds. That's probably not good for my neck.
* I didn't know it at the time, but this ScaryGoRound comic ran the same day. Grim portents, my friends. I should have known better.
Susan amuses with tales of the personals section of the London Review of Books. It sounds pretty sad, alright, but there's just no competing with the personals section in 2600. Seven listings; seven requests from prison inmates for letters.
Computer crime: an even worse way to meet girls than you thought.
This was projected on the outside of the YMCA tonight, as the radio station held an "open house" in the lobby. I really think I should get a discount on my membership dues for this. I go to the gym in an increasingly feeble attempt to feel like a badass. It's not going to help matters if my chosen location for manly endeavors starts trying to associate itself with John Mayer.
