The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) -- what to like

Thar be spoilers below.
 
There's a lot to like here.  The transition from the end of the first film through Beorn's land is fairly brief, but manages to retain nearly all of Beorn's actual character from the book, right down to Gandalf reminding the dwarves to send the ponies back to their master rather than risk his wrath.  Mirkwood is handled as having a general, hallucinogenic quality to its effects on the company, rather than the somewhat individual and haphazard dangers presented in the book.  Lee Pace is fabulous as Thranduil, whose role is increased in order to better draw the relationships between himself and the dwarves of Erebor.  It's particularly wonderful to compare and contrast Elrond, Galadriel, and Thranduil, and how they have been consistently presented as elvish, but with very different individual personalities. Tauriel's Bizarre Love Triangle was completely unexpected and not unwelcome.  Gandalf's exploration of Dol Guldur and the necromancer's revelation as the Enemy has a great look and feel, as does Smaug.  I really enjoyed that there are more displays of dwarven manual dexterity as they toss objects to one another, even if it meant making the escape by barrel "exciting".  The choice to interpret the Black Arrow as a projectile fired from a ballista is a very interesting one, though I'm a little saddened that the movie history of the Black Arrow means that it's unlikely the thrush will be needed to carry a message from Bilbo to Bard.  I'm also a little saddened that Azog can travel from near the Carrock to Dol Guldur within what appears to be the same night, and that the dwarves can travel from Laketown to Erebor in less than a day, but... bygones.

Muriel Spark

I've been thinking about how sequencing affects our impression of an author.

About a year and a half ago, I picked up Memento Mori, and immediately became a Muriel Spark fan.    Loitering with Intent confirmed that belief, and I followed it with Aiding and Abetting, The Finishing School, and A Far Cry From Kensington**, around the holidays, but none of these were as good as the first two I'd read.  Also somewhere in there, I started but couldn't finish The Mandelbaum Gate.

Over the course of this year, I've gone through Territorial Rights (April), The Abbess of Crewe (July), and The Ballad of Peckham Rye (September) with the same "these are all right, but not nearly as good as Memento Mori" impressions.  Why do I keep reading after seven relative disappointments?  Well, they're short.  I could complete each of these in no more than a few hours of reading (with the exception of The Mandelbaum Gate, which is why I dropped it), so there isn't a lot of risk in hoping for another Loitering with Intent.  Still, if I had read any of these other books first, I might never have discovered the ones I really like, and would have a lesser impression of Spark's abilities.

Now I finally came to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (yay!  it was in the library!) and The Girls of Slender Means.  I can't say that I *enjoyed* these as much as I enjoyed the first two Spark books I read, but they are effective and affecting tales of British women in the aftermath of WWI and WWII, respectively.  

** To be fair, A Far Cry From Kensington may be much better if read after The Girls of Slender Means

Undesirable motor vehicle driver behavior

I arrive at a 4-way stop.  My left turn signal is on.  Three seconds later, a driver arrives at the intersection opposite where I am stopped.  They flash their lights at me to signal that I should go, sadly oblivious to the crossing guard and several grade school children in the walk that I need to cross in order to make my left-hand turn.

Stay safe out there, because some drivers won't see you, even if they merely have to glance in your direction to notice you're in plain sight, even if you're in that same spot at the same time every workday.

Cognitive dissonance; or, "Friending" on G+

If you use Google+, perhaps you've noticed that when someone adds you, it now doesn't ask whether you want to +Add or +Circle (or whatever the action used to be called) them back, but to +Friend them. Like this is Facebook or something.

Now, it would be one thing if I were simply snarking and whining about window-dressing, and it didn't matter whether Google uses +Add or +Friend to describe this action.  The problem is that, aside from the fact that after clicking +Friend, you're immediately asked whether the Noun (is a person, place, or thing) is a friend, or family, or acquaintance, or whatever, the act of Friending on FB is quite different from the act of "Friending" on G+.  

• On FB, Friending is a symmetric, two-way act. I send a Friend request to you, which you must accept before our posts show up on each other's walls.
• On G+, "Friending" is an asymmetric act.  I add you to a circle, and your public posts appear in my stream, but you can ignore me completely.  

Written like that, it sounds like a minor difference, but it's actually important and quite powerful**.  Conflating these very different actions by using the same term that FB uses actually makes it harder (IMO) for people to switch from FB to G+, because people have expectations about what it means to "Friend" someone, and if an action using the same term doesn't behave the same way, that will send them scurrying back to FB.

I guess I'll just have to be content for the fleeting moment that the e-mail notifying you that someone has added you to their circles still asks if you want to add them to yours...

** Okay, I was going to link to a page that clearly explains why this difference is important and powerful, but all I can find are pages from two years ago that aren't quite what I'm looking for.  Thought there would be more easily findable recent and relevant discussion.

Room at the Top; John Braine; 1957

I want to like this book for the good parts, but there's a vast cultural chasm of casual violence against women that simply cannot be bridged.

There's a love scene that begins well with a line from Alice:

"I'm all twisted.  This is a terribly moral kind of car."

...and as she and Joe are getting out of the vehicle:

She kissed my hands. "They're beautiful," she said.  "Big and red and brutal... Will you keep me warm?"

Hands that can do violence to you are sexy, Alice?!  Later, Susan and Joe have the following exchange:

"I'm not cold, so there."

"Don't argue. Or I'll beat you black and blue."

"I'd like that."

Susan would really like to be beaten?!  Or she thinks he'd like to beat her and by acquiescing to that he'll be sweet on her?!  Or they're just joking?  I'd like to think it's just a bad joke, but later Alice and Joe, in what I can only imagine was intended as part of a longer romantic passage:  

"This is the country for passion, darling."

I bit her ear gently.  "Is that a promise?"

"Anything you want," she said in a whisper.  "You can beat me if you like."

What the hell??!  If this were BDSM, I wouldn't "get it" but at least could accept it.  This feels like a complete mischaracterization of male-female relations.

Sometimes your best isn't enough (sports voodoo edition)

My in-laws are from the Pittsburgh area and, therefore, Steelers fans.  The Steelers have been terrible this year, but found themselves at the beginning of this week 5-6 and facing the 5-6 Ravens in Baltimore.  If the Steelers could win this game, the rest of their schedule was relatively easy (compared to that of the Ravens and the 5-6 Titans) and they would have a good chance to go to the playoffs.

So, like any good son-in-law, I wrote to Bill Simmons (the Sports Guy), who does weekly football picks against the spread, and who is having a terrible year**, to pick against the Steelers.  The stars aligned, and he incorporated reader e-mails into his picks this week (scroll down to Ravens (-3) over Steelers), and it seemed like happiness would reign in Pittsburgh***.

So, of course what happened is that the Steelers covered the spread, but lost the game.  I am truly in awe of Billy Zima's stink this year.  

Well... for the sake of my in-laws, at least the Penguins lead their division in the NHL.


** As of this writing, Simmons is 75-97-6; just how bad is this?  Well, if you were to flip a coin to make your decision for all 172 games that weren't a push, you would expect to do better than 75-97 about 94.6% of the time.  That's not "statistically significantly worse than a coin flip at the 0.05 alpha level" bad, but close.

*** Well, until being bounced out of the first round of the playoffs, because they're really not very good.  The fact that the Steelers could even sniff the playoffs this late this year says more about the wacky state of the NFL than the quality of the Steelers.

Movember

Two weeks of growth, two minutes to cut off

The week after returning home from running usability sandboxes at Information on Demand, I decided to shave only parts of my face in support of Movember.  It started to itch the day before Thanksgiving, so it's gone today.

Flibbertigibbet (something new every day)

I'm in the middle of John Braine's Room at the Top, where I encounter the use of flibbertigibbet, and immediately begin wondering whether it inspired or was inspired by "Maria" in The Sound of Music.  Its use in "Maria" comes two years after the novel, and I also learn that it's a Middle English word.

After retiring from the Auror Office...

...Harry embarked on a second career on the musical stage.  He and Ginny were particularly well received in a turn as the Thénardiers, with Ginny's rendition of "Master of the Wand" netting her a best supporting Olivier.  It had to be returned, however, when the Ministry discovered Ginny had accidentally Imperius-cursed a hall full of muggles during a particularly energetic performance.

Compiègne

In the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the... eighteenth year?  Drat you, Bismarck, for putting Europe off pace to end World War I in 1911.

Tricks in your treats

Parents are warned to examine their children's Halloween candy for needles, blades, and drugs, but I wasn't prepared for real estate advertising:

This is:

1. Leftover promotional candy from work that the person gave out on Halloween
2. A brilliantly insane ad campaign, because the people receiving the candy cannot actually buy real estate (granted, their parents should see it)
3. Unintentionally hilarious because I keep seeing two "t"'s instead of "rt" in the surname
4. Some combination of all of the above

 I vote for #4.

Dilemma (Orson Scott Card division)

You may have heard of the controversy around the upcoming movie Ender's Game.

Here's my dilemma: Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, at their core, are all about man's inhumanity to other sentient life due to a massive misunderstanding of the Other.  These works have messages that should be celebrated, and run completely counter to Orson Scott Card's publicly stated beliefs.  It seems to me that we should definitely read and discuss the first two books (get them out of the library), and educate the populace to be like Ender, not like Card.

Poor customer service + Little-known state regulations + Honest company = Big fat check?!

Our neighborhood was built on solid rock; my understanding is that our lot was a swampy part of a farm that was drained (60's and 70's-era wetlands management, bay-bee!), and what they found under the muck was solid rock, but anyways, that means we don't have a basement, and we aren't hooked up to city gas, so even though we live in Vermont's equivalent of a major metropolitan area, our house has a big tank of #2 fuel oil for heating and a smaller tank of propane for the oven and range -- the previous owners had a propane-fueled heating stove that they used as an alternative to the fuel oil-powered baseboard heat, but they really wanted to take the stove with them, so we actually use very little propane.

So, at some point not too long ago, our propane provider began charging us a rental fee for the tank**. More recently, they were bought by Amerigas, and changed our account number... after they had sent out the yearly bill for the tank rental, so of course they misfiled our payment -- it was accepted and cashed, they just didn't credit our account -- and after I called and they admitted their mistake and said they would straighten it out, of course they didn't, and that's when we looked for a replacement and found Patterson Fuels, who are awesome.

Amerigas was then supposed to pick up their crappy old tank and go away, but of course they didn't get around to it for nearly a month***.  They were crazy-makers, but we were done with them.  Or so we thought, until we received this letter:

This is the most hilariously unexpected correspondence we've ever received.  I've blacked out the amounts, but let's just say that given how little propane we use, all our cooking fuel needs and tank rental fees for the time we were Blue Flame / Amerigas customers were effectively free. 


** This was when we should have started shopping around for another fuel provider, but for some reason we didn't. 

*** and when they finally did pick it up, they filled up Patterson Fuels' tank, which is a big no-no.  We complained to them about it, but I still don't have the full story on how that ended

The Heroes; Joe Abercrombie; 2011

The Heroes is a writing exercise gone incredibly well.  Abercrombie masterfully orchestrates the movements of a cast of dozens (even the minor characters were distinct enough that I never needed to refer to the character index) through a 3-day battle** in a highly satisfying way.  It's truly impressive and should be required reading for writers.

Just don't expect a particularly satisfying, central, overarching plot.  

I also found that there was no one I really cared about, in the sense that anyone and everyone could have died, and it wouldn't really make a difference to the events.  While one could argue that's the point the author is driving toward, it doesn't make for a great story.  There's a reason why the red wedding is so powerful. 


** plus some preface time to establish characters and epilogue time so that we come full circle


Note: published 11/15/2013, backdated to 10/27/13 when I finished the book.

No Highway; Nevil Shute; 1948

I was hooked by the opening paragraphs, and for two beautiful chapters, I loved No Highway for its portrayal of the workings of a research institution as it discovers and combats a captivating problem without any human antagonist or melodrama.

Then... the wheels come off in chapters 3 and 4**, as we follow Mr. Honey instead of Dr. Scott (Janet!  Brad!  Rocky!).  Oh, chapter 3 starts off promisingly and chapter 4 ends well, but in between we're treated to some of the worst-written scenes of internal drama -- the aging actress wondering if she's wasted her life being rich and famous instead of being a wife, the young stewardess thinking about how she'd be great with kids if and when she decides to leave the airline, the captain thinking about how his buddy would never have crashed a plane -- maybe it wasn't as cliche in 1948, but it's aged very badly.  

The rest of the novel follows this general pattern, in that the parts where we follow Scott are generally quite readable and the parts where we follow Honey are filled with tripe -- it would have been best to stick to Scott's POV entirely, I think.  I think there's a great story in here that could be well adapted to film, but given that the 1951 movie starts Jimmy Stewart as Honey... I'm frankly a little terrified to watch it.  Maybe a young Winifred Banks will be the deciding factor in favor of watching it, but for now, netflix appears to not have it.


** perhaps it would be more appropriate to say... the wheels are pulled up?

Leyland retired, Baker fired

With Leyland tired of being in the dugout and assuming Detroit doesn't want Dusty Baker to destroy their murderer's row of starting pitchers through letting them throw too many innings, that leaves  the immortal Bruce Bochy, he of the .500 career winning percentage, the active manager with the most wins (and tied with Terry Francona for most WS wins).

I kid, sort of, of course, because Bochy's seemingly unimpressive .500 career winning percentage is more a product of managing my beloved San Diego Padres for many years than any real ineptitude on Bochy's part.

Bochy started managing the Padres in 1995, and got to oversee the great Tony Gwynn's golden years.  While Gwynn was technically an active player in 00-01, he managed fewer than 200 plate appearances in those seasons.  Even in 1998 and 1999, Quilvio Veras posted a higher WAR than Gwynn. 

From 2000-2002, Phil Nevin and Ryan Klesko were Bochy's best position players by WAR, and Woody Williams and Brian Lawrence were the best pitchers. 

In 2003-2004, Mark Loretta was his best position player by WAR, and Peavy slowly established himself as the staff ace.

Bochy took over the Giants in 2007; this was Bonds' last year, Randy Winn was his 2nd best position player, and everyone already knew Zito's contract was an albatross.  What kind of masochist takes this job?  Someone who spent the previous 12 seasons managing the Padres, of course. 

In 2008, a 34 year-old Randy Winn was his best position player.

Despite neither Lincecum nor Cain reaching their 2009 peaks again, the Giants managed to win the 2010 and 2012 World Series with Buster Posey as the only position player who could crack the Yankees' starting lineup. 

If the '98 Padres had managed to sneak a WS win over the Yankees, Bochy might be the greatest manager of doing more with less of all time. 

Rules of Civility: A Novel; Amor Towles; 2011

Rules of Civility, turn turn turn, tell us the lesson that we should learn.‎

I thoroughly enjoyed the body of Rules of Civility, which takes its name from Washington's writing exercise.  I was thoroughly bored by the "Preface"; if a friend hadn't recommended the book, I might have put it down, but fortunately I started Chapter 1, and there the writing suddenly takes off, like stepping from the black-and-white Kansas of Katey's middle age to the Oz of her youth -- the problem was no "Over the Rainbow" to keep you going until you get to Oz.  

By the time I finished the "Epilogue", I disliked the "Preface" somewhat less, but I still feel that Towles is a little too cute about Val's identity**, it makes Tinker appear more important than I think he actually is***, and bookending the main story as a reminiscence is ultimately a tiresome device in the otherwise snappy story of Katherine Kontent in the late 30's New York.


** I kept waiting for Val to appear during the book, and minor spoilers, he does!  Even though I was waiting for it, I missed his name on the first time through, and was annoyed by the time I got to the end and positively identified him.  By contrast, I did like how on page 21 of the hardcover, we are given the following:

Tinker answered relying on the ellipses of the elite: He was from Massachussetts; he went to college in Providence; and he worked for a small firm on Wall Street -- that is, he was born in the Back Bay, attended Brown, and now worked at the bank that his grandfather founded.  Usually, this sort of deflection was so transparently disingenuous it was irksome, but with Tinker it was as if he was genuinely afraid that the shadow of an Ivy League degree might spoil the fun.

As someone who identifies with Nikki Muller's plight, I initially found this passage irksome, but Towles later turns these words around to good effect.

*** though, given Towles' proclivity for misdirection, perhaps we're supposed to get the idea that the novel is about Tinker and Katey, when really it's about Katey.  I'll have to think about that.

Note: posted 10/25/13; backdated to 10/9/13 when I finished the novel

Books I've read

I've been keeping track of all my leisure reading for a while.  Like, 20+ years.  It started out on paper, then was a text file for a long, long, time, then I considered putting it in a database and making a PHP project out of it for while, and finally it's a public Google spreadsheet.

Please note:

1. All dates of completion prior to 2004 are highly approximate -- that means I made them up.  All I recorded prior to 2004 was the order in which they were completed.  Also note that sometimes I'm reading two books at the same time, or avoiding reading one book (hello, Gargantua!) while completing several others.
   
2. I've also probably forgotten to record some books along the way, and been inconsistent about recording the reading of chapter books to the kids, largely because the reading often gets split between me and Sarahmac.  The books listed here that are noted as read to the kids were read entirely by me, I think.
   
3. Regarding my "ratings", this is a half-assed attempt to mark books I recall liking or stood out in some way (*), books I really liked (**), books I loved (***), books I hated (-), and Shadow Moon (--).  I spent a lot of time trying to figure out whether I needed a two-pronged rating to show the difference between books I liked on technical merits versus those I was merely fond of, or whether to add a "recommended" tag in addition to the rating, and instead simply spent an evening throwing stars on the spreadsheet.  I've likely mislabeled some books in there.
   
4. Regarding my notes on books, I've found that the same book can elicit vastly different responses from people who are equally well read (including myself at different times).  If you disagree with any of my opinions, that doesn't make either of us better or worse than the other, just different.  In many cases (and more regularly beginning in 2004), I've tried to express (often badly) why I liked or disliked a book.  Feel free to tell me why you (dis)agree.
   
5. Also, I'm much more forgiving of books that are shorter.  I don't think it's an attention deficient problem; more of an impatience with many writers who can't (or won't) hone their words to say what they want to say and be done with it (okay, maybe that's an attention deficit problem). 
   
   Gravity's Rainbow, for example, is a work that I would likely more greatly enjoy if the ghost of Ezra Pound had taken his blue pencil to it.  There are many wonderful passages in this novel, but too much of it is "other stuff" that marks time between the beautiful prose.   
   
6. Why so many SF/Fantasy books?  Because I took the Nebula Awards finalists list and started reading; not in any particular order.

Crossing to Safety; Wallace Stegner; 1987

I've been having trouble figuring out what to write about this, but perhaps it would suffice to say that this is the finest novel intended for adults that I've read in a long time**.  So maybe I'll mostly just steal the author's words from a moment in the novel when the author goes all meta on us.

It's a quiet novel about the long term friendship between two couples, and is entirely lacking in "the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish [...] the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends [...] the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power [... the ...] speed, noise, ugliness, everything," in fact, "that novelists seize upon and readers expect."  

In short, it has everything I want and none of the bull.


** I liked Behemoth (YA SFF) and Night (non-fiction) equally well this year, but they are very different works.

This rabbit hole leads to Triple Town data analysis

Well, how did I get here?

1. Commenting on a previous post, a friend suggested a new game to try.  
2. The Wikipedia page for Gone Home notes it uses the Unity Engine.
3. The Unity Engine page lists Triple Town as a client app.
4. The Triple Town page notes some research done on the distribution of tiles
5. This Triple Town Tribune post by Andrew Brown mentions that the data was collected by David de Kloet.
6. The data was originally shared in the comments of this post, which I found by searching on "David de Kloet triple town" in G+. (NOTE: I also asked Andrew if he had a copy of the data, which he was kind enough to share)

Now, the distributions are a good start, but my first question is: does the probability of getting a particular tile on your next tile depend upon the tile you've just been given?  For example, if you've just been given a bear, are you more or less likely than the overall estimated probability of 0.15 to get another bear with your next tile?

A quick way to start examining this is to look at a crosstabulation of the tile you've just been given by the next tile.  In this table, the rows show the current tile, and the columns show the next tile.  Looking at the first row, what this means is that of the 1043 total times that a Bear appeared, it was followed by another Bear 157 times, by a Bush 157 times by Grass 637 times, and so on.  

The raw counts are useful, but it can be hard to compare rows to see if they're different.  So now let's look at the row proportions.  Again, the rows show the current tile, and the columns show the next tile.  Looking at the first row, what this means is that of all the times that a Bear appeared, it was followed by another Bear 15.1% of the time, by a Bush 15.1% of the time, by Grass 61.1% of the time, and so on.  Bears appear pretty consistently around the overall average of 15.1% of the time, though they seem to appear less often after a Hut (11.4%) and more often after a Tree (18.4%).  However, Huts and Trees don't appear very often, so these differences could be due to chance.
 

So let's look at the chi-square test.  SPSS Statistics produces both Pearson and Likelihood Ratio chis-square tests.  Since the significance values of the tests are each under 0.05, this suggests that there is, in fact, a relationship between what tile you have now and the next tile you'll get, but I'm a little worried about the large number of cells with low expected cell counts.  That can throw the results of the test off.

So another set of tests to look at are pairwise comparisons of the column proportions.  (NOTE: I really want to compare the row proportions, but that's not an option, so I've reorganized the table so that the current tile is in the columns and the next tile is in the rows)  At any rate, the tests suggests that when your current tile is a Tree, the distribution of your next tile is different from when you current tile is a Bear, Bush, or Grass.  

Looking back at the table of proportions, what's not clear from the test is whether the detected statistically significant differences come from the relatively higher rate of Bears and lower rate of Bushes when the current tile is a Tree, or whether it comes from the relatively higher rate of Huts and lower rates of Bots and Trees.  The latter sets of relative differences arises from very rare events, and I wouldn't trust results based on that.  We could re-run the test while ignoring those columns, but for now I'm pretty comfortable saying that there is no practically significant relationship between the current tile and the probability distribution of the next tile.

These tables were produced using this SPSS Statistics syntax on this text file.

Saving a call to the repairman (Bosch washing machine edition)

We have a front loading Bosch 300 or something (I don't see the number anywhere on the machine itself, and the manual is, of course, for a whole line of machines).  It's great, given us no trouble until this morning's second load returned E:13.  Too many suds?  No.  Drain hose blocked?  No.  Time to turn to google.

This post on appliantology got me started in the right direction, because in the end, it turned out to be a blocked drain pump, but the posted instructions on how to get at the drain pump weren't right for my machine.

I wanted this video to have all the answers, but while the drain pump is, in fact, located in the front lower right of my machine, I don't have handy-dandy flip-down access to it on my machine.  

Fortunately, the manual does provide instructions on how to access the washer pump.  I couldn't understand the instructions (much cursing ensued), and the process is utterly ridiculous given the simplicity of access shown on the model in the video (more cursing ensued), until the 6th picture in the manual showed enough from my POV that I could figure out how to remove the panel, unscrew the pump cover, and remove a heavily damaged and stinky sock.

We're out of beta we're releasing on time

At the risk of corporate shilling, I'm actually kinda excited to finally be able to talk about the product I've been working on, because we shipped v1.0 at the end of May***.  It's called IBM SPSS Analytic Server, and its purpose is to coordinate the execution of analytic jobs (like, building a neural network to predict loads on an electric utility's network) in a distributed environment (like Hadoop).  The 1.0 version of Analytic Server is integrated with IBM SPSS Modeler 15, an existing data mining workbench, and IBM SPSS Analytic Catalyst 1, which is a totally new thin-client application that automates some exploratory steps in order to jump-start deeper analysis of data.

If interested, you can read more about it at the Analytic Server information center.


*** Yes, yes, I meant to post about it then, but have been swamped by other things.  Also, slacking off on posting this has made this my 500th published post on this blog.  Woo.

Inheritance; Lan Samantha Chang; 2004

Lan Samantha Chang leaves her Hunger comfort zone of the Chinese-American experience and the short form to write Inheritance: a Novel of a Chinese family in the years leading up to WWII (and not about dragons).  While I think Hunger is a much stronger work, this is still worth a read, if only to get to "The Lake of Dreams" section of the book.  In fact, I might even recommend forgoing the first 250 pages and reading "The Lake of Dreams" as a novella.  It would be somewhat rough going, not being able to immediately place every name in relation to the narrator, but that disorientation resolves itself as you read on.

Sadly, Inheritance also enters the Annals of Bad Editing for the following:

Hsiao Taitai held the reigns...  [pg 119 of the first edition hardcover]

and then

He had the room for one [a maid]; and he liked the idea of a young woman, one of these wasp-wasted... [pg 125]

It was the second typo, within 6 pages of the first, that riled me.  Someone get the copyeditor more coffee!

[note: post backdated to when I originally finished the novel and wrote up notes on it, but actually published on 8/25/2013]

2013 Colchester Triathlon

Pictured, at least a few people finished behind me on the swimming. 

Sunday was the 29th annual Colchester Triathlon, and my fourth, and the results are in (actually, the results were immediately in, because this year we had anklets with chip timers in them).

Also, for the first time since I began participating, the transition times were broken out from the race times.  Now I'm not sure whether I actually did better than my last year's times, or whether I was actually slower on the racing legs because last year's racing legs included the transition times.  I think, maybe, or maybe am just hoping, that it's the former.

This year vtsportsimages got nearly everyone on the swim, bike, and running legs, so I now have a swimming picture (see how kind I was to wear a rash guard so you're not blinded by my pasty white flesh?) to go with last year's cycling picture (apparently, I look more or less exactly the same on a bike from year-to-year).  I will not be showing a running picture until I learn how to run properly, or at least look like I'm running in the picture.  :-)

Takeaways:

1. I was advised to get a wetsuit.  Maybe if I can find one on clearance.
2. My conditioning was better, but could still be improved.  A couple of spectators were alarmed by my loud breathing (I do that even when I've only been running 5 minutes, much less 25; I'm like Monica Seles out there, only if she sang snatches of "I Wanna Be Sedated" during the bike leg).

Primary goal for next year: wetsuit or no, improve that swim time.  I'm finishing 96th on the swim, 83rd on the cycling**.  That's not good enough for someone who considers himself a swimmer.  I know I can crack 2min/100 yards, so there has to be more pool/lake time next year.  A better running time will have to flow from improved conditioning through swimming; at 40+ years and a 6'5" 200+lb body, I simply can't commit to doing more running to train (the wear and tear would be too much).

** Note: All Sports Events has an interesting concept of how far 1/2 a mile is.  An 18:34 1/2 mile is closer to a 2:15 / 100yds pace than a 3:27 / 100yds pace. 

Frankie and Johnny Are Married (2003)

Now available in videocassette and DVD!

I love getting these "old" movies out from Netflix.  I mean, jeez, this is around when we ditched all our VHS tapes and cut the cable.  I guess they wanted as wide a distribution as possible in the home video market, because it grossed only $22k in the theaters.  Ouch, which is too bad, because this movie definitely deserves a wider audience.

Frankie and Johnny Are Married has some absolutely wonderful moments, I love the real-life married couple playing the semi-fictionalized versions of themselves, Stephen Tobolowsky provides a few good minutes for Michael Pressman to reflect, and David E. Kelley's two short scenes are great (especially the second, where Pressman asks him how Kelley and Pfeiffer manage their personal relationship amid the potential for professional jealousy).  

Overall, it's almost a very good film.  I recommend it, but be prepared for the rough patches where you'll find yourself checking the time.

Old news

This has been the week of learning about old news.  In no particular order:

1. daddytypes' amazing Marxist review of the Crayola Factory in Easton, PA.  This speaks for itself.
2. The existence of the LandfillHarmonic Recycled Orchestra.  Again, speaks for itself.
3. Ryan North's review of the novelization of Back to the Future.  (note: this will be given further comment at a later date)
4. David Milano's project to read H.P. Lovecraft to kids around Halloween and have the kids draw pictures of Cthulhu.  This is now on the calendar, along with the yearly reading of A Night in the Lonesome October.
5. The fact that North Dakota is not a state. 
   
   How is this not huge news?  I mean, after 100+ years of pretending North Dakota has been a state, I assume we'll just go on pretending that it was a state all those years, just as soon as they fix the state constitution.  Of course, it took 16 years just to put together a bill to make those corrections!!!  What the hell, North Dakota?  The scary part is that when I google north dakota not a state, I get a bunch of posts that mention the story, but no follow-up on whether they actually fixed their constitution.  Well, did they?!  Or have they been so busy trying to ban abortion that they forgot?

Statistical follies: "peak" cars in VT

UVM economist Art Woolf suggests 

Vermont may be on the declining side of a “peak cars” curve.

...and offers the following graph as evidence.
 

The problem is that simply looking at the number of registrations is misleading, because registrations are strongly associated with the size of the driving population.  This is noted in the title and article, but the author doesn't actually, you know, deal with it.  We're really interested in whether the typical Vermonter is more or less likely to own a car now than 10-20 years ago.   A more useful chart would look at the number of registrations, relative to the size of the driving population (say, by plotting the ratio of registrations to population on the vertical axis) over time. 

Moreover, the numbers in the bar chart in the article don't match the numbers from the census (the census is counting buses, but the census numbers are lower than Woolf's, so maybe Vermont has negative buses?).  And, of course, the article contains no references or (heaven forbid, because it's only 2013) links to the data source the author is using.

 

Using Census motor vehicle registration and population data, I see something more like:

1980	1985	1990	1995	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009
347	398	462	492	515	534	537	516	523	508	588	565	581	557
511	530	563	589	609	612	615	617	618	619	620	620	621	622
0.68	0.75	0.82	0.84	0.85	0.87	0.87	0.84	0.85	0.82	0.95	0.91	0.94	0.9

 

the last row is the ratio of registrations to population, suggesting that the rate of vehicle ownership has increased over the last 30 years.  I'm a little suspicious (okay, a lot suspicious) of the enormous jump from 2005-2006, but have no experience with the data from which I can form a hypothesis, other than, "someone should check that out."

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel; Michael Chabon; 1988

I believe there exists a Michael Chabon novel that I would like, but The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is not it.

I went to the library in search of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, but it was out, and how could I resist a book set in Pittsburgh?  Well... The Mysteries... suffers greatly in comparison to The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which also features a protagonist with a dark past, newly-made gay and potential-love-interest friends who are more glamorous than the protagonist, and dangerous antics involving motor vehicles.  The problem is that while Perks features an important reveal and a reasonably satisfying conclusion, Mysteries just sort of fritters away 300-odd pages.  This might be more "realistic", but isn't very good storytelling.

Citizen, you are not being actively monitored. Enjoy your trip!

Today, about 5-10 miles from the border, my spouse started to receive text messages welcoming her to Canada... even though she never actually crossed the border.  #verizonIsWatching

The Mighty and Their Fall; I. Compton-Burnett; 1962;

Everything I said about the dialogue-happy prose of The Death of the Heart goes double here.  This is a stage play and not a novel.  One chapter in, I don't believe in any of these characters, and am not interested in reading another 200 pages.  Maybe later.  

No back cover comparisons to other writers here; I'd believe in comparisons to Spark, but I greatly preferred Memento Mori to this.

The Death of the Heart; Elizabeth Bowen; 1938

I stopped part of the way into chapter 2.  There's a lot of dialogue.  I like dialogue, but this feels like it should be a stage play instead of a novel.  It's not bad, but not sticky enough to make me want to read another 300 pages of it.  Maybe I'll come back to it another day.

The back cover has the following quote from Victoria Glendinning:

She is a major writer ... She is what happened after Bloomsbury ... the link that connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark.

I'll buy the connection to Iris Murdoch, but would really like to hear more of an explanation of why Bowen's writing has any connection to Virginia Woolf's or Muriel Spark's, except that they are sufficiently famous British women writing at the appropriate times to shed some fame on Bowen. 

Street Smart; 1987

All you should need to know is that Christopher Reeve agreed to inflict Superman IV on the world in order to secure the funding to make Street Smart, which proceeded to recoup less of its budget at the box office than Superman IV.  Oi.

The plot is simple: journalist needs a story and makes one up; it turns out to be true, he gets in hot water for it, and has to find a way out.  It's a good plot, and there are lots of ways to use it, but since the story is about a pimp, it ends up being a gritty little movie about ugly little people. 

This wouldn't be so bad, but I didn't see this movie in 1987.  I watched it for the first time in 2013, and I've already seen Reservoir Dogs.  That movie isn't about pimps, but from 1987's perspective, it was the future of gritty little movies about ugly little people, and once you've seen something like Dogs, you can't go back to the plodding storytelling of Street Smart.

Starting With The Academic Subjects In The Mirror

Apparently we need more funding for Humanities so that our children can write and think clearly.  I really hope the article writer doesn't have a humanities education, because this article is a mess.  He begins by asserting a "war against humanities", but provides no evidence of such a contentious thing, thus we are supposed to assume that there can be no argument against there being an actual war against humanities. 

We are, however, treated to a number of sky-is-falling statements with links to articles and papers provided by, among others, "The Humanities Commission", which is clearly an independent group that has no stake in securing more funding for humanities.

We are then shown a pie chart.  What's wrong with this chart?

What's wrong with this chart is that it makes all of the pies the same size.  But we know they're not.  Size the pies relative to the total funding for each field.  Let's see if that blue wedge in the Humanities is about the same size as those for other subjects.

Now let's think about why STEM subjects might require more funding, especially funding from big sources like the federal government.  I'm thinking that maybe, just maybe, it has to do with the fact that STEM subjects require expensive lab space and equipment that are wholly unnecessary in humanities. Could we do a little digging before slapping this into an article?

My favorite part, however, is the following quote, concerning how students write:

They can assemble strings of jargon and generate clots of ventriloquistic syntax. They can meta-metastasize any thematic or ideological notion they happen upon. And they get good grades for doing just that. But as for writing clearly, simply, with attention and openness to their own thoughts and emotions and the world around them — no.

This describes the vast majority of writing published in humanities journals, where you are given tenure based upon how well you've obfuscated the fact that you have nothing new to say, and not, god forbid, on how well you've taught your students to write "clearly, simply, with attention and openness to their own thoughts and emotions."

I agree that being able to communicate your thoughts clearly is important, and I think that can and should be part of a STEM education... and I also think that the Humanities need to take a long look in the mirror and fix their own broken systems.

They did so many points last game!

The Sportland Sports were playing last night.  I didn't watch, not because I wasn't interested, but because we haven't had cable TV since late 2004.  I just don't want to pay for adware (commercials on top of paying for cable TV on top of paying for internet access for something that could be streamed on YouTube).  Aside from missing the occasional sporting event of interest (this year's finals, the Federer-Nadal Wimbledon final), this has worked out pretty well, and I can still listen on the radio.

That said, I think I would pay money to see Shane Battier do the Sam Cassell big balls dance.

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)

What a mess.

spoilers

On one hand, I really enjoyed the 2009 Star Trek reboot, and in many ways they simply applied the same formula with a different villain in Star Trek Into Darkness, so why did I dislike this film so much? 

Well, while the 2009 film had a mostly dumb plot, it got a pass because:

1. it looked beautiful, 
2. I was absolutely charmed by the ability of the cast to fill the very big shoes of the original cast (with the exceptions of Simon Pegg and Anton Yelchin, who never quite settled into being Scotty and Chekov), with special kowtowing to Karl Urban's amazing portrayal of McCoy,
3. it's the "origin story" movie, so it's expected to be a little slower in order to establish characters

Once the main characters are established in the "origin story", however, the second act needs to take those characters and run.  Look at The Empire Strikes Back; The Dark Knight; Behemoth; Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (wait, bad example).  STID drags from movie A with Kirk breaking rules to movie B with some guy's dying daughter and a stranger who wants to him, back to movie A with Kirk losing the Enterprise even though his actions have a perfectly reasonable explanation, back to movie B where the guy with the dying daughter blows some place up.  This is all so that the mysterious stranger can try to kill Starfleet high command, but he seems to only manage to kill Pike** and then he flees to the Klingon homeworld.  Marcus tries to set up Kirk to kill the mysterious stranger with some new type of missile that will set off a war between the Klingons and the Federation, but the mysterious stranger gives himself up (and reveals that he's Khan) when he realizes he's being threatened with 72 missiles.

STID actions are illogical and don't have meaningful consequences.  Is Khan actually working with Marcus prior to this moment, and he realizes he's being double-crossed?  I can't think of any other reason why he'd go to the Klingon homeworld.  Kirk loses his ship for being a loose cannon and regains it 10 minutes later; Kirk dies and is brought back to life 10 minutes later; and on and on.

I do have to admit that when Sarahmac pegged Alice Eve's haircut as Dehner's, we began to fall in love with the idea that the producers weren't being coy about whether Cumberbatch was going to play Khan, because he was playing Gary Mitchell, and they'd rewritten "Where No Man Has Gone Before" with a stronger plot and better special effects.  Instead... well, instead, I'm trying to look upon the bright side, which is that Simon Pegg and Anton Yelchin seem to have figured out their roles, the rest of the cast still nailed their characters, and Karl Urban is still amazing.

** this is a waste.  Killing Pike here is like killing Apollo Creed in Rocky IV; it's a ham-fisted reason for us to hate Ivan Drago / Khan.

Pretties; Scott Westerfeld; 2005

It's always fun to observe a writer's evolution. 

So Yesterday shows us some good writing, but the plot is weak.

He adds a plot with real stakes in Uglies, but while well written, Uglies is the standard dystopia-masquerading-as-a-Utopia theme that we've seen a hundred times before, and there are few surprises in the plotting or characterizations.  Uglies does do an excellent job of leading us in to the sequel (a feat he manages equally well in the transition of Leviathan to Behemoth).

In Pretties, Scott Westerfeld makes The Leap from promising writer to excellent writer.  Not only do we have the pleasure of his writing and a plot with stakes, but it has a fresher perspective, as if The Time Machine were written from the perspective of the Eloi.  It's great, and the start of the chapter "Lurker" and the introduction of the concept of the "milli-Helen" as the unit of beauty required to launch exactly one ship, while a minor thing, was the moment I realized he'd made The Leap (a sort of anti-Nuking the Fridge).

There's a worry-making couple of chapters near the end where I thought he might be losing grip on the story, but it's clearer now that it will be worth it in Specials and Extras.  O . M . G .  I'm hooked, Mister Westerfeld.