Reactors

The Japan earthquake/tsunami and ensuing nuclear power plant problems have caused another round of teeth gnashing in Vermont over the impending closing of the Vermont Yankee power plant (which is being challenged by Entergy), presumably because we get so many earthquakes and tsunamis on the Connecticut River.  As part of this, there is a photographic exhibit in Montpelier on Chernobyl.  I have to admit that my favorite (if such a word applies to this) Chernobyl photo collection is still Filatova Elena Vladimirovna's.  My BIL pointed me to her "Ghost Town" collection years and years ago, and she's slowly added to it since.  If you haven't browsed it since it first made internet waves 8 years ago, it's worth another look.

Flowing Data posted about the NYT Rock, Paper, Scissors article, and while I work for the company that works hard to crush the humans in competitive games, there is no way a machine is going to be me at RPS**, even with a significant amount of training, because I'm learning about it while it's learning about me.  Results after 11 shakes against the expert machine below:

After snookering it rounds 4 and 5, I was impressed that it learned enough to go for paper instead of rock, and then to go for paper again, and then for scissors, and then to actually have the gall to get me in round 9.  I'm fairly confident I could stay slightly ahead of the machine (until mental exhaustion hit, which of course wouldn't be a problem for the machine), but I don't think it would be by much.

Undergraduate Grades

In my reader, I saw the Daily Princetonian reported on a recent Daily Chronicle editorial (the Duke University student paper) on grade inflation.  I thought perhaps Val's time had finally come to have his ideas implemented at Duke, but but this particular Chronicle editorial was just the latest in a long-term discussion on grades -- search on grade inflation and you get results going back to at least 1997, when Val proposed the achievement index and was shot down by fearful humanities professors.

Deserted Cities of the Heart (Lewis Shiner) 1988

Another one of If Shiner's first novel weren't Frontera, it's hard to see how this book would be classified as SF instead of "mainstream" magical realism.  I thought it was a great title, but apparently it's a Cream song.  The Falling Woman won the Nebula the previous year; was there a run on Mesoamerican themes in the late 80's?

You Again (2010)

There's a great movie somewhere in there trying to get out, but while it has a few good moments, it doesn't really deliver on the promise of the premise and ends up squandering the talents of Kristen Bell and Sigourney Weaver. 

Potential problem: the end credits are the most visually interesting part of the film.  It's a romantic comedy, so it's not a killer.

Bigger problem: if Joanna is truly reformed, why does she seem to go out of her way to taunt Marni?  Why, because the writers couldn't figure out how to manufacture plausible conflict.  Moo.