2014 in audio-visual media

I don't keep a spreadsheet of every movie/tv show I watch, but Netflix does provide a list of every DVD we've rented and everything we've streamed, which is pretty close.  So I know, for example, that in the ten years since we cut cable TV and joined Netflix, we have rented 1291 discs, with a very small year-to-year variance; in 2014, for example, we had 131 discs out.  That's a lot of movies and TV shows over the years.  2015 will be different, though, because we've cleared the backlog of older movies in our "to see" list, and more movies appear to be available via streaming, so we've gone to 1 at-a-time.

What I'm not seeing, as I scan the list of 2014 rentals, is a lot of 5-star ratings, or even 4's, that we were seeing for the first time.  With that said...

Best of what we saw for the first time in 2014:

• Gravity.  This provides a textbook example of how to start, pace, and end a movie.  No wasted minutes here.
• Veronica Mars.  This is the movie funded on Kickstarter, not the TV show (we watched that in '09).  It's not a great movie, but there were enough moments that tickled our fondest memories of the TV show that it belongs here. 
• Avatar: the Last Airbender. This is the cartoon TV show, not the dreadful live action adaptation.  The first few episodes of this are really slow, but we stuck with it because a friend recommended it.  It gets better.  Much, much better.  It can be a little simplistic at times (hey, it's a kids show), but it has fantastic characters, some excellent plotlines to follow, and an epic "The Beach" episode in Season 3 that is mostly a total digression from the main plot, but is soooo worth it.  And no, you can't simply go watch "The Beach" episode on its own.  It won't make sense unless you've watched everything before it.
• Your Lie in April.  This is an in-progress anime, based upon a manga. We're actually watching this on Hulu, not Netflix.
• Young Justice.  We discovered Teen Titans last year, but this is the year our kids became netflix-streamed superhero cartoon junkies, starting with Spiderman and His Amazing Friends (shockingly rewatchable after 30 years), Justice League, JL Unlimited, Batman: the Brave and the Bold (the best possible show with a 60's-70's kitsch ethic), a variety of X-men shows, and, my personal favorite, Young Justice (so far, we only have access to the first season; maybe it's no good after that, I don't know).

Better than it should have been:

• Pacific Rim put Godzilla to shame and, for all of its flaws, became the standard bearer for what a modern kaiju film should be like, taking the mantle that Destroy All Monsters held for 45 years.  The only good things I can say about the 2014 Godzilla film are that I like the 2014 Godzilla monster design, and that this movie made me realize that the 1998 Godzilla film may not have been quite so bad after all.
• Arrow.  If you told me just ten years ago that my favorite live action superhero TV show would be about Green Arrow, my first reaction would have been, "Who?" and my second would have been "GTFO!"  But it's true.  There is nothing remotely deep going on here, and no single episode stands out as particularly good, but the first season has a solid overarching plotline, characters we care about, and the show is relentlessly watchable.  
• Reign.  Sarahmac discovered this in the fall; I haven't watched all of it, but Season 1 grew on me. But this reminds me of something we watched earlier in the year: Davinci's Demons is another pseudo-historical drama that is obviously someone's labor of love.  There's a lot of potential here, but there's also a lot of unnecessary "hey, cable TV can show sex and violence!" pandering that doesn't fit into this show as well as it does in Game of Thrones.
• Given how well it was received, I'm not sure Guardians of the Galaxy belongs on this list, but I never really liked any of Marvel's forays into space before.  Guardians of the Galaxy hits the right tone in the opening credits, features an incredible scene-stealing voice acting performance by Bradley Cooper**, and is a great prison break movie, but then there's another hour of film and a bit too much soul-searching before Quill's dance off with Thranduil, I mean, Ronan. I really wanted to like X-men: Days of Future Past more, but while it features a lot of really good actors, the only scenes that stand out in my memory are Quicksilver's.  The "Time in a Bottle" sequence and the opening of X2 are the two best effects scenes in the whole X-men movie franchise, including the Wolverine movies.
• Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.  This really doesn't belong in this post, but I started a post on "Rob Corddry and light apocalyptic romantic comedies" after we saw this and Warm Bodies, and never finished it.

Stuff we actually saw in the movie theater:

• The Lego Movie.  Also belongs in the "Better than it had any right to be" list; it's up there with the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie among my favorite movies that should have been awful, shameless marketing hacks but rose above that and went on to lead respectable lives.
• The Hobbit: the Battle of Five Armies.  I'm tired of saying and thinking negative things about the Hobbit movies.  I loved the image of Thorin pacing the golden hall that was created in the second movie; I wish we saw more of that.  And while I'm at it, I want a war elk and a prequel movie with more Lee Pace as Thranduil.

** GotG put me in the mind of Aladdin, which also featured a personable roguish male lead and a somewhat faceless female lead that you get the feeling is a lot more interesting than the script allows them to be, who are both overwhelmed by a larger than life personality who becomes the focus of every scene he's in.  I'm not sure which of Drax and Groot is the magic carpet and which is Abu, but the comparison ends with Ronan=Jafar, because I simply can't see Gilbert Gottfried as Amy Pond.

2014 in reading

I continue to maintain my spreadsheet of books read, and I've gotta say that 2014 was a fantastic year for reading books, even if I only read two books that were actually published in 2014:

• The Blood of Olympus ends the latest Percy Jackson series.  It's a perfectly enjoyable read, but feels like a step down from the quality of structure Riordan achieved in The Son of Neptune.  Still, my family will be back next year for the first book in his Norse gods series.
• In the Red is Elena Mauli Shapiro's second novel (full disclosure: the author is a friend), and the story is completely unrelated to her debut novel 13, Rue Thérèse.  I liked In the Red, because I greatly appreciate the brutal honesty of Elena's prose, but both liked and enjoyed 13, Rue Thérèse.  

Books I wish I'd known about before:

• Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint and Privilege of the Sword.  The latter was on my reading list only because it was a finalist for the 2007 Nebula Award (I'll hold off on saying it was robbed until I read Seeker), but it's even better if you've read Swordspoint, an excellent and extremely underappreciated novel when it was published in 1987, as an appetizer.
• The Awakening. I suppose it's been on the shelf since I moved in with my spouse, but I never really looked at it before.  The Wikipedia article calls Wharton and James contemporaries, but Kate Chopin is dead before The House of Mirth is published, and something about James' writing has always driven me nuts; I can't read him. So The Awakening is huge to me.  

Books that were better than I expected:

• The Rise of Silas Lapham suffers from some dull moments and a dreadfully poor Impediment To Happiness, but also has some very well-written and funny passages.  For a novel published in 1885 by an author I'd never heard of, it was a pleasant surprise.
• The Quiet American is a Vietnam war novel.  At first, I thought, "Yawn, we've seen it before."  But... it's set in the early 50's, before the United States is fully engaged, so it's a very different sort of story.  Well worth the brief time it took to read.  (Then as an antidote, the hilarious Our Man in Havana; while reading it, I imagined Alec Guinness in the lead role of a film version, and to my delight, such a thing exists!)
• Among Others, for reasons explained in the linked-to blog post.
• But the biggest surprise of all was Moonraker. I hadn't read any of Fleming's books before this year, so my mind's concept of Moonraker is that awful 1979 Roger Moore movie.  The book, though!  My, my, my.  I may have to read the rest of the Bond series.

Other highlights:

• The Fault in Our Stars may actually have been my favorite book this year.  By stars in my "rating system" it is, but with 20/20 rosy memories, I may be more fond of Kushner.
• There were several other books on my reading list with a star.  I'm too lazy to call them all out here, go look for yourself (scroll to the bottom).

Ender's Game (2013)

So, we netflixed Ender's Game.

It's a solid SF film with some good performances, and is reasonably true to the book, or at least my 20+ year old memories of the book. 

I would like to see a version in which Harrison Ford and Viola Davis switch roles.  They would both be capable of this.

You might recall that, at the time the film was released, there grave concerns about Orson Scott Card's homophobia, and whether one can support the art without supporting the person.  Generally I'm for listening to Wagner and opposing anti-Semitism, living by Jefferson's ideals and opposing slavery, and so on.  Still, everything they have done carries a taint for me.

This put me in mind of Bill Cosby, because I find it easier to separate Card, Wagner, and Jefferson the sometimes-a@@holes from their work.  Why is that?  I think it's because the "persona" of Bill Cosby the man, even if it is merely a front, is inextricably tied to his work, so I can't watch "Bill Cosby: Himself" any more.  It would be like if any of the Fred Rogers rumors were true.

My contribution to Movember 2014

Lord Marshal Sideburns

This was inspired by Sarahmac's recent infatuation with the first season of Reign, which is at times a surprisingly well written teen girl dramedy that has an unfortunate tendency to delve into testosterone-driven male adventure and unnecessary pseudo-mystic BS.  

At any rate, Sarahmac is on Team Francis, so I decided to grow cheekburns, which turned into sideburns that Ambrose Burnside wouldn't be ashamed to have in his regiment.  

On the other hand, maybe I just look like Sam the Eagle.

Customer service follies (motor vehicle service edition)

We purchased new tires for our car last December (through the dealer, Heritage Toyota, which was our first mistake, but they had been pretty good on the service front).  Over the course of the intervening year, we noticed that we were regularly having to put air in the tires, and when Sarahmac took the car in for regular service today, she pointed that out to the service tech.  They made sympathetic noises, but didn't find any leaks in the tires, but that there was significant damage to the wall of the right front tire, and recommended replacing it immediately (and that we should pay for it).  Sarahmac naturally didn't want them to install another crappy leaky tire, and brought the car home.

I called the dealer and explained in no uncertain terms that I was unhappy with having bought tires that needed to be replaced after a year; they said they could look over the tires and determine whether anything could be done (because, apparently when Sarahmac mentioned it this morning, they didn't take the uterus-haver seriously); I said I would bring it back immediately, and that I needed the work done in two hours so I could pick up the kids from school.

When I arrived, there was nothing in the system about my problem; I asked in no uncertain terms for the tech to hunt down the tech I had talked to on the phone because I didn't want to explain everything all over again; no, I didn't have her name, because I had assumed we were in the 21st century and that when I arrived they would route me to the correct person (also, when I'm furious and furiously trying to contain that fury, I forget to write down the name of the person I'm talking to), and now this apparently makes me the bad guy because the tech I'm now talking to gets an attitude.

He finally goes off in a huff to find the tech I talked to on the phone, and when she arrives, everything is okay, they're ready to work on the car.  After an hour and a half, the car is ready, they determined that there was a leak between the tires and rims (translation: they installed the tires incorrectly a year ago) which was now fixed, and they replaced the bad tire for free.

Everyone (well, everyone except the snippy tech) was perfectly "nice", but they didn't do the right thing by the customer until I started playing bad cop.  I expect that when dealing with out-of-state institutions, but didn't expect it when dealing with Vermonters.  Oh, well.

I would not. I wood knot.

My hopes have been dashed, for Tyrion slept on the deck of a ship:

...the deck was hard, and he woke stiff and sore, his legs cramped and aching.  They were throbbing now, his calves gone as hard as wood.

Let me get this straight: he sleeps on soft pillows and wakes up stiff as iron, but we he sleeps on the hard deck of a boat, only stiff as wood.  And I was hoping for steel, or maybe adamantium.

So I've moved on to a new game.  Jon was talking to his steward about how to feed everyone through the winter:

"We can always hunt if need be," Wick Whittlestick put in.  "There's still game in the woods."

"And wildlings, and darker things," said Marsh.  "I would not send out hunters, my lord.  I would not."

In the very next chapter, Tyrion's companions are talking about food:

Young Griff said, "There must be fish in the river."

"I would not eat any fish taken from these waters," said Ysilla.  "I would not."

Whee! 

He arose from slumber and noted the ferrous-like qualities of his cloven nose

A while ago, sometime after finishing A Feast for Crows and during the 6 year wait for A Dance with Dragons, I promised not to read any more of a Song of Ice and Fire until the series was finished.  The TV series is making me break that promise, so here I am reading A Dance with Dragons. 

Without spoiling anything, the first chapter after the prologue is from Tyrion's POV.  Within it, we are told:

He woke naked on a goose-down feather bed so soft it felt as if he had been swallowed by a cloud.  His tongue was growing hair and his throat was raw, but his cock was as hard as an iron bar.  [emphasis mine]

Dozens of pages later, but in the very next Tyrion chapter:

When he woke his stunted legs were stiff as iron. [again, emphasis mine]

I'm hoping that this is the start of a book-long, nay, rest of the series-long in-joke by the author in which every Tyrion chapter has him wake up and compare some part of his body to the element with atomic number 26.

Tone deaf? German Butcher Museum

A German butcher

I learned the other day that the city of Böblingen proudly hosts the German Butcher Museum.  I know that the art of preparing meat has a long and culturally important history among Germanic peoples, but I also can't help but wonder if they understand what most people outside das Vaterland think of when they hear the words "German butcher".  

Schrodinger's Code Freeze

Image from TestSheepNZ's post on
Schrodinger's cat and code dev.

There is a code base in a remote repository that is set up for continuous builds and has successfully passed all verification tests.  There are a number of developers who have write access to the code base so that, perhaps in the course of an hour, one of them delivers a change set to the repository that breaks the build; but also, with equal probability, perhaps no breaking changes have been delivered.  If one has left this entire system to itself for one hour, one would say that the build is broken if breaking code has been delivered.  The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the working and broken builds mixed or smeared out in equal parts.

This may or may not be based on a conversation with coworkers.

Catalog != Book

People are forwarding around this IKEA ad, which is disturbing in a number of ways.

Yes, the IKEA ad is a reasonably clever bit of marketing, but it's not a book, no matter how thick the catalog is.  Are that many book lovers out there really so concerned about the triumph of the Kindle that they must celebrate the printed word, no matter how bastardized the form?

Also, srsly? it's like the forwarders have never seen the Medieval help desk before.

Books that stayed with you

I was recently tagged in a "name 10 books that have stayed with you" lists on FB.  The instructions say to not think too hard about it, and don't take too much of your time, but the request isn't to name books I've read in the past year that I might recommend to friends, the request is for books that stayed with you.  This is about books, and is therefore important, and therefore demands some thought.

I could go through the list of books I've read for fun in the last 20+ years, but that ignores the first half of my life.  Also, I would probably disqualify anything I've read in the last, say, 5 years, because they haven't had time to "stay" with me.  Still, it might not be a bad place to start.

[15 minutes later]

Turns out it's a bad place to start, because there are lots of books I haven't thought of in a while, but as soon as I see them while skimming the list, I have fond memories of them.  Have they really "stayed with me" if I haven't thought of them in 8 years?  Instead, let's start at the beginning, with books that have literally stayed with me since the 70's:

Bedtime Stories. Illustrated by Tibor Gergely, this isn't the Great Big Book of Bedtime Stories, but a smaller collection with just "The Gingerbread Boy", "Little Red Riding Hood", "The Three Billy Goats Gruff", and "the Four Musicians".  I love the illustrations in this.  Also, it wasn't until I looked up his Wikipedia page just now that I discovered Gergely illustrated Scuffy the Tugboat.  I also liked that and a number of other Little Golden Books.  Scuffy probably deserves a place on the list.

Mickey and the Magic Cloak.  This is part of the "Disney's Wonderful World of Reading" series; there were others that had better stories, but this one stays with me because when my mom read this to us, she would read "cloak" as a two syllable word, long "o", short "a", which would simultaneously delight us and drive us nuts.  Honorable mentions: Donald Duck and the Magic Stick and the Mystery of the Missing Peanuts.

Green Eggs and Ham.  There are a number of Dr. Seuss books I could choose from, but the simplified Orwellian dystopia presented by Green Eggs and Ham in which the unnamed protagonist comes to love Big Brother (Sam) is the one that stays with me.  Honorable mention: Fox in Socks.

The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.  I had a single book that contained the Tales of Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, Jeremy Fisher, and Squirrel Nutkin.  Beatrix Potter can come across as a little didactic, but she has a wicked sense of humor.  Nutkin was my favorite of these stories for reasons I don't recall.

Meet Theodore Roosevelt.  We had a whole series of "Step-Up Books" that covered history ("Meet Washington/Franklin/MLK") and nature ("mammals/birds/insects do amazing things").  The "Meet ..." books did a wonderful job of humanizing historical figures by introducing them as children and telling their histories in a simple, personalized way that includes details you don't get in history class at school.  They also do a great job of connecting events to geography (with a map on the inside cover) and other events (Teddy was 7 years old when Lincoln was shot, and saw the coffin pulled through the streets of NYC during its tour of the North) so that you learn early to see history as more than a series of disconnected dates and events.  Honorable mention: Meet the North American Indians, because I'm part Penobscot.

Something Queer is Going On.  If only because I still want to see a LGBTQIA musical version.

My Birthday Book About Me.  This is a "personalized" book where you fill out a form and it comes back with your name and your friends in it!  It's pretty formulaic, but was nevertheless fun to know what gemstone, flower, and zodiac sign correspond to your birthday.  The best part about my birthday book is that my brother's and my birthdays were mixed up when the forms were sent in, so all my personalized stuff is wrong.  Fortunately, the illustrations are all the same in every book, so it's easy to make corrections.

Richard Scarry's Great Big Schoolhouse.  I taught myself how to write in cursive from this book.  So even the characters in his books act completely insane, I'll always remember this one fondly.

Do smart people really live in [geographic location redacted] ?

A friend recently asked this question about a specific place, and the only answer I could come up with was:

There are really smart people living everywhere in the world.  [Geographic location redacted] is one of those places where the choice of living there is not one of the smart things those people did.

I like the universality of this answer, but Google's location services can't find [redacted] anywhere on Earth.

Permutative ninja turtles

The latest xkcd got me thinking about how I've long liked the fact that the words in the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" theme can be easily permuted with no change to the rhythm of the song; for example, "Mutant Teenage Turtle Ninjas", and how changing the order of the words in this way makes repeating that line over and over a little more interesting, and while I love the thought of singing "William Henry, Duke of Gloucester" to the tune of the TMNT theme, it doesn't permute very well.

Heroes in a Half Shell by mattcantdraw

However, when permuting the words in the original TMNT theme, you can't really put "Teenage" in the last spot because the noun form is "Teenager", which breaks the rhythm. Without resorting to something awful like "Teener", then, how many permutations of TMNT does that leave us?

Combinatorics doesn't come naturally to most of the human species, but this one is relatively easy.  With no restrictions, we would normally note that there are 4 possible choices for the first spot, then 3 for the second, 2 for the third, and 1 remaining choice for the last slot, so 4*3*2*1 = 4! = 24 permutations.  With the restriction that only 3 of the options are available to the last spot, then there are 3 for the first spot, 2 for the second, and 1 remaining choice for the third, so 3*2*1*3 = 3*3! = 18 permutations before you have to repeat yourself.  Yay counting!

Demolish != Destroy

I was glancing at 10 Mythical Things that Actually Existed over Sarahmac's shoulder and saw the claim that the Tower of Babel "was a ziggurat named Etemenanki, a temple to the god Marduk that was later destroyed by Alexander the Great."  And I was, like, WTF?  The Macedonian army destroyed Persepolis, but Babylon was treated well AFAIK. 

Well, following the link to Etemenanki, the Wikipedia page states:

In 331 BCE, Alexander the Great captured Babylon and ordered repairs to the Etemenanki; when he returned to the ancient city in 323 BCE, he noted that no progress had been made, and ordered his army to demolish the entire building, to prepare a final rebuilding.

There's a big difference between "destroyed" and "demolished, after years of failed attempts to repair," and we have a responsibility to use phrasing that doesn't completely misrepresent what happened.

And yes, there's a lot of "Duty Calls" at work here.

Among Others (Jo Walton) 2010

This might not be the best book I read this year, but it might be my favorite.  Suzy McKee Charnas's back cover blurb beautifully explains its charms:

I don't know when I've seen such an intense, heartfelt exploration in fiction of what it is to struggle with being an outsider as a young person.... This is a love letter, laced with sharp-edged anguish and triumph, from within the SF/F genres to the SF/F genres.  Among Others shows just how such books are not only entertaining stories but social lifelines.

Ironically, Charnas's The Vampire Tapestry was not published in time to be name dropped in Among Others (the narrative of which ends in February 1980), but I like to think that Mor reads it soon.

I'm even more overjoyed to have been recommended this book because I read Farthing seven years ago, based on the strength of it being a finalist for the Nebula award, and was so put off that I didn't bother looking up any of Walton's other books.  Now I might have to go look up Tooth and Claw... and since Fletcher Free doesn't have it, I'll make like Mor and fill out an inter-library loan slip.

Colchester Triathlon 2014

Sadly, there will be no results to post this year, because the race was called due to thunderstorm**.  Shortly before 8am, they announced that the race would be delayed at least an hour, and they would make the call at 9am.  Just before 9, the skies opened, lightning flashed, and everyone mourned.  Even rained out, this was still a wonderful event to attend, chatting with volunteers and hopeful participants.  I'll be back next year.

Still, it is a little weird to have all this swag for an event that didn't happen.  I guess now I know what it's like to own a "Denver Broncos 2014 Superbowl Champions" t-shirt.

** Apparently, the Lake Placid Ironman Triathlon was affected by the same storm, but I don't see any news of that posted yet.  And, of course, the rain stopped here around 11am, and the skies had brightened and the sun is threatening to show itself around noon.  Sigh.

City of Burlington looking to sell Burlington Telecom

This makes me sad.  Like our transportation system, internet service should be public infrastructure.  Whether we get to our favorite websites via an asphalt highway, gravel drive, or dirt road should not be at the mercy of "market forces"**, but a conscious choice made by citizens.  Ten years ago, when we voted for BT, I thought we, as a City, recognized this, but a combination of factors (active interference from Comcast, a less-than-competent rollout of service, the financial meltdown of 2008 unexpectedly coming at the same time BT was looking to refinance their loan) have eroded voter confidence and many are ready to get rid of it.  

Ironically, at the same time we are looking to divest ourselves of control of this service, Google is touting the importance of the internet to our small Vermont businesses.  Google is right, but our future success requires statewide, top-notch connectivity.  Leaving that entirely in the hands of Comcast and Fairpoint seems like a poor option to me.

** there are multiple providers in VT, but Comcast is the only provider at my address

The Dungeon of Dread

At the moment, we're playing with the Pathfinder system.  We needed something after the short module in the Starter Kit, so I cobbled together a module from the Dungeon of Dread Endless Quest book and put it here.  The PNG is a flowchart map of the dungeon and the document describes the dungeon.

The party consisted of four female elves; one cleric, one mage, two rogues.  Favorite moments: 

• This party is highly dexterous, so they tended to creep up upon encounters.  When they met the bugbear, their plan was to throw a flask of oil at it and fire flaming arrows into it to ignite the oil.  One rogue successfully hit the bugbear with the oil, but the other rogue and the cleric missed with the arrows.  In the next round, both rogues and the cleric missed with the arrows, at which point, the bugbear ran.
  
  The all-elven party missing moving targets with their missile attacks became a running theme throughout the dungeon crawl.
• They encountered Black Fang, chained up, before Kalman, debated whether to set Black Fang free, and eventually decided to come back later.  After killing Kalman, they used the slightly defective wand of polymorph to turn Black Fang into a black kitten... which has extra-long canine teeth and bat-like wings

We now have the Rise of the Runelords adventure path to work with, but this was fun, so I might have a go at the other Endless Quest books.

Update: this is the map the players drew of the dungeon as they experienced it.

Man of Steel Redux

My subconscious keeps coming back around to Man of Steel.  I'm extremely fond of the Margot Kidder Lois Lane, but never really liked the fact that a reporter of her caliber was fooled by the glasses.  They've done a nice job in this movie to make Lois a good investigative reporter; in fact, they've done such a good job that I think the Superman movie I really want to see is told from Lois Lane's POV.  She's an established, award-winning investigative journalist who latches on to the myth of the "man of steel", a mysterious bigfoot/loch ness-style figure.

Man of Steel (2013)

The first 20 minutes of this movie should have been left on the editing room floor.  Everyone on Krypton understands the importance of the codex, and that natural childbirth hasn't occurred in generations, and so on, but it's all a mystery to us.  This is terrible storytelling.  If they wanted for these things to be a mystery, we should start with Clark, for whom it's a mystery, and follow his POV.  For that matter, all of the flashbacks could also be dropped (except for the very last one).  With those simple changes, this is a much tighter, stronger film.

Even then, there are lingering issues:

• How much did IHOP pay to be featured so much in this movie? 
• Why can't Zod restart the Kryptonian species in another solar system?  They seem to be trying to paint him as a complex character at the start, so why is he suddenly completely amoral?  Also, Michael Shannon is no Terence Stamp, and yes, I readily admit that assessment is entirely fueled by nostalgia.
• Why does Superman have to fly up into the beam of the World Machine instead of smashing it from above?  Because it "looks cool".  Yawn.
• The destruction of the World Machine, followed by the mano-a-mano fight with Zod, is waaaay too long.  And I don't buy the agony over what to do with Zod in the end.  Sometimes you have to put mad dogs down.

Big Blue and Little Green

Normally I simply roll my eyes at the content-free screeds that come out of the Ethan Allen Institute, but this piece by Rob Roper is ever so slightly more interesting to pick apart.  

I think everyone agrees on the importance of small business in VT**, but instead of the anecdotes presented, I'd like to see him do the research so he can show statistics on whether small businesses are going under at a higher rate than usual because of Shumlincare.

** After all, offering IBM $4.5M to stay is a bit...

(Disclaimer: I say this as an individual, and not as an employee of IBM SWG BA)

Roper also makes hay with the CNBC report... unfortunately, while they furnish a qualitative explanation of their methodology, they don't provide the points given in each area to each state, just the rankings in each area, so essentially they've given no justification for the individual rankings in each area, so there's no way to debate the merits of the rankings.  More disturbingly, while they state that "Education and business go hand in hand," and that they " rate states based on the education level of their workforce", their actual rankings of states by workforce and education appear to be opposites.  It looks like the education ranking is, indeed, a measure of the education of the workforce, while the workforce rankings are heavily weighted on the availability of cheap labor (i.e., places with high unemployment and weak unions).

Once again, let's see some real numbers to back up your arguments, boys.

Deadliest animals

This is a cool infographic.  Like most such graphics, it raises lots of questions.  In addition to Nathan's question about the wide error margin, I wonder:

• Why isn't the tiger on this list?  They appear to kill more people per year than lions.
  
• It's a little weird to compare animals that directly kill humans with animals that are vectors for diseases that kill humans.  Should tuberculosis be on the list?  That apparently kills 2 million people a year.
  
• What is the deadliness by rate of exposure?  That is, what proportion of mosquito-human interactions result in human deaths?  I expect the proportion of tiger-human interactions that result in human deaths to be quite a bit higher.

Eli McBeal

I have been shirking my duties to the Star Trek: Relive the Majesty community for a little while now, and one of the things that has intruded upon Trek watching is Eli Stone, a surrealist lawyer drama that ended up in our queue because we needed our Jonny Lee Miller fix until the next season of Elementary is available. 

Eli Stone rightly draws comparisons to Ally McBeal; it's essentially the same show with a male lead and transplanted to San Francisco**, only with weaker writing.  In the first two seasons (when I recall Ally McBeal was good; it's been 15 years), they did a wonderful job of creating court cases whose ethical quandaries had parallels to the latest mini-crisis in Ally's life, and we would see how her personal decisions compared, contrasted, affected, and were affected by, her arguments in court.  Eli's cases and personal life are typically more directly linked, so the stories simply are not as rich.  

I've also been disappointed by the start of the second season.  Characters who were saintly in their tolerance of Eli's behavior in the first season are suddenly mad at him in the second season for acting in exactly the same way he always has; moreover, they seem to have extremely short memories when it comes to the fact that Eli's quirks seem to be part of what make him a good lawyer.  The ship is righting itself in the second half of season two, but I see why the show was cancelled.

All in all, it's not a bad way to multitask for ~20 hours over the course of a few weeks.

** one thing they do well in Eli Stone is to give you the sense that you're in San Francisco; I don't recall Boston being the setting of Ally McBeal so much as their unisex lavatory.

Reunions

I was at my 20th college reunion, engrossed in a great conversation, when someone pointed out it was five minutes past the hour and I was late for class.  Again. 

Then I woke up.  Ah, the dangers of going back.  At least I wasn't up at 2am struggling with one of Shimura's problem sets.

#goingBack

How to take a screenshot on a Nexus 7

It's a simple process...

 

... that captures not only what's displayed on the screen, but also all your fingerprints.  It does, unfortunately, require another device, but is still far superior to the official instructions.

After all, I need to share those Androminion games where I have more victory points than all other players combined.

Clash of Clans

Reporting three weeks in to my own village: Town Hall is still level 5 (same as last week); most of this week has been a matter of upgrading buildings and participating in my first Clan War.
 
Perhaps this has been done in other games and I'm just ignorant, but I like how SuperCell has created a social game with a PvP element that seems to elegantly avoid the possibility of bullying via ganging up to repeatedly destroy a particular village, all through the simple tactic of not allowing you to search for a specific opponent when you go on a raid. 

There are lots of nits to pick in gameplay, so I'll just focus on the most serious I've seen: it appears to be a valid, possibly even preferable, strategy to purposefully lose trophies so that you can amass enough resources to make a major upgrade in peace.  For example, when upgrading your town hall to level 8, rather than leaving yourself open to loot raids from other members of the Gold league, you can easily make several attacks where you send in a single barbarian in order to get knocked down to the Silver or Bronze league, where no one can effectively steal resources from you.  This is perverse, and staying in your "proper" league needs to be properly incentivized, possibly through sizable loot bonuses for membership, or by not allowing you to drop down a league once you've attained a particular level (though this latter might have its own problems if someone rises too fast through the ranks).

Okay, one more because it's related and I've just been through a Clan War: I don't think there's enough incentive to stretch yourself to go after the best-defended war villages.  Because getting stars is what matters most, too many of our high level clan members are going after weaker villages.  Theoretically, this should backfire against a well-organized clan that right-sizes their attacks, but the reality is that most clans have enough members that aren't participating that this is a valid, even preferable, strategy.  The problem is that it shuts out the weaker members of our clan who are slow to attack the villages that they have a chance of winning against.  A simple solution might be to only give you a maximum of 2 stars if you win against someone weaker than the village that CoC automatically "matches" you against (CoC seems to choose a village that's much weaker than what you can actually beat).

The Incredible Snowman

There must have been some gamma rays in that old fedora they found /
For when they placed it on his head, the Skrulls he began to pound.

A favorite hat and an Avengers-fueled weekend resulted in several rounds of "Frosty Smash!!" play.

Update: Captain America and Baron Zemo settle their differences the old-fashioned way... on the tennis court!

Tablets

I bought a 2013 Nexus 7 off eBay for < $150, have been playing with it for a week, and have the following observations:

1. When searching for Nexus 7's, it's really important to differentiate between the 2012 model, which had a much lower screen resolution, and the 2013 model.  The 2012 models tend to go for less on eBay, but the prices are all over the place.

2. The higher screen resolution on the smaller screen is totally worth it. 

3. The 7" size is a great size for carrying around in my hand, but we also still like the 10" screen (our experience is with an iPad2) for sharing the screen with someone else while sitting on the sofa.  They have slightly different "sweet spots" for optimal use.

4. Compared to the iPad2:
4a. I really like that there are no physical buttons on the face of the Nexus.

4b. I like that there are three virtual buttons on the face of the Nexus that go Back, return to Home, and bring up the List of Running Apps, compared to the single physical button on the iPad2 that returns to Home (1-click) or brings up the List of Running Apps (2-clicks).

4c. I like that the buttons that do exist (sleep/off/on and volume) are right next to each other on the edge of the device, rather than on different edges.

4d. I like the stronger integration of my Google account, so that there is an on-screen widget that displays my calendar.

Some of these features may be equally good on the iPad mini.  I suspect that on the iPad, the integration with an Apple account is better, so the Nexus is a better fit for me personally.

5. Androminion, not Sanger Rainsford, might be the most dangerous game.

VSO: May 3 (Debussy, Ravel, Mahler)

Great concert.  We've been attending Vermont Symphony Orchestra concerts when we can for the last 12 years, and they are noticeably better now than in 2002.  Tonight's program showed off Albert Brouwer's talents as principal fl(a)utist, beginning with Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune.  He managed to linger  over notes in a way that was more suggestive of the sleepy faun than in any other recording or live performance I've heard, and the rest of the orchestra followed suit.  Jaime Laredo should be rightfully proud of this interpretation.

The second piece was Ravel's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in G Major.  It's an interesting piece, and was well-performed, but I didn't realize Ravel produced anything quite so modern -- the Adagio of this concerto is Romantic, but the first and third movements are extremely dissonant -- and it was a curious choice to sandwich between two masterworks of the Romantic period. 

The final piece, after intermission, was Mahler's 4th.  I'm extremely fond of Mahler's 4th and 5th symphonies, and the first movement again featured Brouwer's flute.  I've never seen the 4th performed live, so I've never seen the principal violinist swap between her usual instrument and the violin tuned at a higher tone.  That was fun.  The fourth movement featured the soprano Hyunah Yu, who, in addition to a fine voice, has the most exquisite diction when singing German that I've heard.

Frozen (2013)

10 Burning questions from watching Frozen: (spoilers)

1. What's with the African-influenced rhythms in a movie set in a lily-white Scandinavian Europe?  In retrospect, I would have loved to see Frozen set in Equatorial Africa with an Ororo Munroe-like princess as Elsa, who is the area's *only* source of ice and cold and snow.  We still don't have an African Disney princess!
   
   Still, the "Fathoms below"-style opening works well, and then transitions into the sisters' story (and Kristen Bell does all her own singing!), and the death of the parents at sea.  I'm drawn in to the story now.
   
2. Who else knows about Elsa's "condition"?  Surely the servants must know, and probably the Regent?  Who are the equivalent of Cogsworth, Lumiere, and Mrs. Potts?  We never get any sense of who these people are.  There are a few servants in drab clothing, but nothing more.
   
3. Why can't Anna and Elsa talk to one another through the door?  There is no answer for this.
    
4. Why does Anna never go outside?  I understand their parents turning Elsa into a shut-in, but why Anna?  This is a missed opportunity to deepen the rift between the sisters -- Anna is known and beloved by the town, while Elsa is perceived as aloof.  When the coronation time comes, many of the townsfolk are muttering that Anna, not Elsa, should become queen.  Elsa could accidentally freeze Anna's heart during an argument at the coronation; if the freezing process is made more gradual, Anna still has time to go on her adventure.  It also gives time for Anna to begin acting more aloof herself; she doesn't recognize that Sven (I mean Kristof) is in love with her because she has begun to shut people out.
   
   Okay, so after the coronation, Elsa runs off, and is beautifully animated like a budding Disney villain, purple cape and all.  It's a great scene, followed up by "Let it go".  This is where hiring Idina Menzel really pays off -- coupled with the animation, this is an amazing sequence.
    
5. Why does Anna not find the purple cape?  Elsa lets it go into the wind, and it's never seen again.  Missed opportunity for an emotional moment when Anna finds it, especially if it causes Anna grief and concern, while "letting it go" was an act of freedom for Elsa.
    
6. Why are the wolves introduced and then never shown again?  Another job for Chekov's gun. Missed opportunity for the wolves to be the "villains"; with the bay frozen over, they come across and attack the town.  And what about Hans, you ask?  See #8 below.
    
7. Why does Olaf have a musical number that absolutely murders the forward progress of the story?  We fast forwarded through this on a first viewing of the movie.  It astounds me that professionals watched this and didn't cut it.
    
8. Why doesn't Prince Hans allow Elsa to show herself to be a monster?  If he's really the villain, we need to be given a better hint before the final act.  But he *can't* really be the villain, because if he's the villain, it makes absolutely no sense for him to talk Elsa down from murder.  This is a missed opportunity to make him a simple gold digger.  Show us Hans flirting with Elsa at the coronation before he moves on to Anna; it's easy enough to explain away in the moment that he's the 13th son, so his father pushes him at every available princess, and then he appears truly to fall for Anna.  Then, when Anna needs Love's True Kiss(tm), it doesn't work, and he laughs a little ruefully and apologetically that he's in love with the town, not her.  And that's fine, because we've made the wolves the "villains".
    
9. Why is it okay for Anna to fall in love with the second guy she's known for a day, but not the first one?  Is it because Anna doesn't marry Sven, I mean Kristof, right away?  Missed opportunity to put him in the Friend Zone.
   
10. As filmed, Elsa is clearly the one with a metaphorical frozen heart that's the real problem; shouldn't she be the one to commit an act of love to cure Anna's literal frozen heart?  Something isn't quite right here. 

Let's go back to the comments on #4.  Prior to the coronation, Anna spends a lot of time outside in the town, beloved by the people as she loves them, but there's still an empty place in her heart that used to be filled by her family.  At the coronation, Elsa accidentally freezes Anna's heart, and then even Anna's love for her sister and the townsfolk begins to cool.  That's right, Anna needs a metaphorical frozen heart.  Elsa, on the other hand, has gone into the wastes and is at peace, until Anna comes to confront her.  This goes badly because Anna's heart has cooled to the point where she can't properly express her love for Elsa, and Elsa rebuffs Anna because Anna and the town now have everything that Elsa believes they wanted in the first place: Anna as Queen.  It is only now that Elsa's serenity has been upset by her disastrous meeting with her sister, that Elsa feels herself to be a monster and the town is put into a dangerous, permanent winter.  Anna returns to town as the wolves come out of the mountains, and she plans to wed Hans in order to cure her frozen heart; prior to the ceremony, she discovers this won't work (see #8).  Hans vows to protect the town and reluctantly determines that the best way to end the Winter is to lead a troop of soldiers to kill Elsa.  Anna still has enough love in her heart to ask Sven, I mean Kristof, to take her to warn Elsa.  They arrive just ahead of/at the same time as/just after Hans (whatever works best) and the sisters embrace, melting each others' frozen hearts.  The ice palace melts, washing them down the valley to the fields outside the town, and the wolves are dumped into the bay.  Hans is apologetic for thinking Elsa was a monster, and is ready to return home in disgrace, but the sisters accept that his actions were made out of love for the town, and he is offered a position as protector of the kingdom (and attracting the eyes of a lovely townswoman -- or a chorus of three, if you want a Beauty and the Beast reference).  Sven, I mean Kristof, is securely in the Friend Zone, and our sisters have a happy ending with a bright future ahead of them.

#ThereIFixedIt

The Great Gatsby (2013)

Some beautiful visual moments.  The inclusion of anachronistic popular music doesn't work for me, especially when there's so much good music from the Roaring 20's to work with.  It worked for me in Romeo + Juliet to take Shakespeare's words and put them in a modern setting, along with a modern soundtrack.  It mostly worked for me in Moulin Rouge! to include the modern pop music, because the setting was tied to that place and not strongly attached to an era, and the inclusion of pop music was a bit of a conceit in a movie that had a lot of comic elements.  The Great Gatsby very definitely has a Roaring 20's-era setting, and is dreadfully serious about itself.

Not quite smart enough for its own good (Gmail detecting missing attachments division)

Gmail is attempting to stop e-mails with attachments that don't actually have attachments.  It's a noble goal, but it's definitely not there yet.  I really don't like having to click OK after I've clicked Send.

Darn Tough

For many, many years I wore Thoro socks because they had far and away the best padding for me.  Unfortunately, I still wore through them all too quickly.  Then I discovered Darn Tough. Not much more expensive than the Thorlos, good padding, local company, and guaranteed for life?  Sign me up.


I wore through my first pair in less than two years (though this particular pair wasn't as heavily padded as some of their other styles).  It was incredibly easy to trade in for a new pair at the Outdoor Gear Exchange, a great customer experience overall, but I hope that I don't wear through future pairs quite so fast.

One Last Dance (2003)

The opening scene of One Last Dance is highly promising, there's some beautiful dancing by the professionals, and a few great monologues delivered by Lisa Niemi, but the rest of the movie is a series of inexplicable mini-melodramas punctuated by some truly atrocious acting from Patrick Swayze.  I can't tell whether he can't settle on an accent or if he really talks like that.  This is a shame, because it's obviously a labor of love, and I wanted to like it a lot.

I did like that we finally get to see them dance (almost) the entirety of the piece without interruption, which is quite a long stretch of film, but in the end, I don't understand at all why the has-been dancers were the principals in the first place, rather than teaching the younger dancers the piece. Revivals are typically adapted to the current composition of a company.

Oh! Joy and Rapture! I can organize my Google Apps quick links

Back in October, I was complaining about the loss of the quick links at the top of the various google apps. This was exacerbated by the fact that the App launch widget mostly showed apps I didn't use or were easy to otherwise get to (why do I need G+ to appear first in the App launcher when it's the only app that still has a quick link?).  Needless to say, I was delighted to see this notice today: 

Drag and drop to rearrange your apps.

Woo-hoo!!
 












Even better, you can add shortcuts to apps that only appear on the "Even more" link.  Well, most of them, anyway (sorry, Orkut and Bookmarks)

Spring in Champlain Valley, and the robins are singing!

Baby, it's cold outside!

Sudoku data

I was given the 2012 and 2013 "Original Sudoku Calendars" as presents prior to the starts of those years, so naturally I recorded the time it took me to complete each puzzle and the date on which I completed it.  A quick perusal of the data shows:

1. I'm not particularly good at Sudoku; I even started keeping track of when I screwed up and had to erase completely and start over.
2. There are some missing times; either because I forgot to record it, or because I was unable to finish the puzzle, or (in the case of a few at the beginning of 2012) I hadn't started keeping the dataset yet.
3. 2013 saw the introduction of "visual" sudoku, in which they used various symbols other than Arabic numbers.  For a variety of reasons, I'm even worse at these than "regular" sudoku.
4. I tended to work on the puzzles in clumps, finishing several each evening for a few days (or airplane flight), and then not doing them for a week to a month (or more)

While working on the puzzles in 2012, I suspected that the "Medium" difficulty puzzles weren't any easier than the "Hard" difficulty puzzles; also, after spending so many hours doing sudoku puzzles, I wondered whether I'd gotten any better at solving them.  Well, after some painstaking record keeping, we can answer that with data science!  So, first a quick look at some descriptive statistics of the time it took to complete each puzzle by puzzle difficulty:

Well, hell.  The Puzzle Difficulty is sorted in alpha order, so because I used text in the Excel spreadsheet instead of a numeric encoding with 1 = Very Easy, 2 = Easy, and so on, the table's out of order.  So, after a little recoding:

Better!  And I even remembered to save the image as a hard-G GIF, rather than a JPG, this time so there's no moiré pattern.  What jumps out at me from this is that:

1. The mean time to complete for each category is about 4 minutes more than the previous category.  That's eerie.  Also, not great evidence to start out for my theory about Medium vs. Hard. 
2. There are many more missing "Hard" puzzles.  
3. The median values are all lower than the mean values, suggesting that the distribution of time to complete is skew for each difficulty level.  That's kind of a "duh" observations, because it was to be expected, but I should check to see just how skew the distribution is.
4. The maximum values for the "Easy" puzzles is higher than the "Medium" puzzles.  This is, I think, due to the "Visual" puzzles.

Breaking the information down further by year, and putting it in a graph so that we can better see the distribution of values, suggests that:

1. I shouldn't be worried about skewness when going to perform statistical tests; yes, there are some outlying values, especially on Easy, but I think these are all the "Visual" puzzles.
2. It looks like I may have gotten better at the Easy and Medium puzzles from 2012 to 2013, but was no better at the Hard puzzles.  
3. My theory that I was no better at the Medium puzzles than the Hard puzzles (in 2012) is alive!

A quick look at boxplots, paneled by whether I messed up and whether the puzzle was "visual", confirms for me that I should go ahead and start building models.

So let's do a general linear model of the time to complete based on difficulty, whether the puzzle was visual, whether I messed up, and the year, with all first level interactions.

Lots of good stuff here.

1. The puzzle difficulty contributes the most to the model (duh, but good to have the confirmation)
2. Whether the puzzle was visual and whether I messed up and had to start over had roughly equal effects on the model.  
3. year did not have a significant effect on the model, which suggests that I did not, overall, get better from 2012 to 2013; however, the interaction of puzzle difficulty and year is significant, which means that the differences between 2012 and 2013 that we saw in the Easy and Medium puzzles may be real effects, and not just noise
4. The interaction of PuzzleDifficulty and Visual is a redundant effect, because the visual puzzles were all of Easy difficulty.  Likewise, the visual puzzles all appeared in 2013, so Visual*year is redundant.
5. PuzzleDifficulty*Messedup is statistically significant.  This means that messing up on a Hard puzzle will have a different, and almost certainly greater, effect on the time to complete the puzzle than messing up on an Easy puzzle (duh, but good to have the reminder)
6. Visual*Messedup is also statistically significant. This means that messing up on a Visual puzzle (which we have seen take longer than regular Easy puzzles) will have a different, and almost certainly greater, effect on the time to complete than messing up on a regular Easy puzzle.  This is really the same type of effect as PuzzleDifficulty*Messedup
7. Messedup*year is not significant.  Screwing up in 2013 was no better or worse than screwing up in 2012.

We could, at this point, look at the parameter estimates table, but it's big and messy and won't tell us anything important that we can't get from the tests of effects table above and the estimated marginal means table below.

1. Messing up roughly doubles the amount of time spent on a puzzle.  This makes sense; often, it's not until I'd near the end that I'd realize that two 7's were in the same row, column, or square (or the like).
2. Visual puzzles took about twice as long to finish as regular Easy puzzles, and messing up a visual puzzle compounded the error.
3. I did, in fact, get better at Easy and Medium puzzles from 2012 and 2013.
4. (*) I appear to have not gotten better at Hard puzzles from 2012 to 2013, and I appear to have been no better at Medium puzzles than Hard puzzles in 2012

I'm putting an asterisk next to this last conclusion for the important reason that most of the missing Hard puzzles are from 2012.  It's extremely likely that these are puzzles that I failed to solve at the time, and would have taken me a long time to solve if I'd kept at them.  I would hazard a guess that I did, in fact, improve on Hard puzzles from 2012 to 2013, and that I took less time to finish the Medium puzzles than Hard puzzles in 2012; my belief that the Hard puzzles in 2012 were no more difficult than the Medium puzzles was predicated upon a lack of completion times for the hardest of the Hard puzzles.

Now, I could make certain assumptions about how long it would have taken me to complete the missing puzzles and re-run the model to do some "What if?" analysis, but I want to stop here for now.  There are also some other methods for modeling whether I got better at solving these puzzles over time; maybe I'll look at them later.


I should also note that I didn't receive the 2014 calender, and so will continue the dataset using puzzles from http://www.websudoku.com/ (though I haven't attempted any this year, so the future of this dataset is actually not very clear).  The biggest benefit to using puzzles from the sudoku.com site is that I can link to the exact puzzle, so that my own dataset could be merged with other datasets kept by other people recording their times.