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
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Why so many SF/Fantasy books? Because I took the Nebula Awards finalists list and started reading; not in any particular order.
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.
Well, how did I get here?
- Commenting on a previous post, a friend suggested a new game to try.
- The Wikipedia page for Gone Home notes it uses the Unity Engine.
- The Unity Engine page lists Triple Town as a client app.
- The Triple Town page notes some research done on the distribution of tiles
- This Triple Town Tribune post by Andrew Brown mentions that the data was collected by David de Kloet.
- 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.
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.
