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.