Friends

He made it safe and sound. Many thanks to treeskin for taking care of him and for making all this work on the other end, to byronsart for transporting him to Kansas City Airport at way too early in the morning, to noveldevice for introducing us and helping with logistics and everything, and to sonatine and Cody for transporting him from Seattle to here today.

He spent about half an hour hiding in various spots, then fifteen minutes wandering around sniffing things, then came over and banged his head on my hands until I started petting him. Even let me pick him up. So I think we're going to be okay. :D

Right now he's still lying on the step. I think it's a cozy, somewhat-hidden space where he can still see everything.

I promise this journal won't be all cat all the time, but it is totally Cyril Day. :D

Just got word from sonatine: Cyril's alive and well (if rather frazzled, poor thing; four-hour flights are not fun) and on his way north. If he's feeling obliging, there will be pictures tonight. (The delay is because it takes a few hours to unload and process everything from the plane. Also, he only did the MCI-SEA wing, but even still, a four-hour flight is a lot.)

(I've been resisting the urge to make, like, seven posts today about cat cat ^ω^ cat.)

Fun question stolen from theferret: What do your RPG characters say about you? What is the common thread?

For me, my characters are almost always about seeing the world through an unorthodox technological filter. My high school Masquerade character was a scientist convinced vampirism had a viral cause. In the D&D game corivax used to run, I was an elf who had been banished for his tendency to use his nature magic to create Frankensteinian chimeras out of cute fuzzy animals to solve random problems. My 4th ed D&D character last year was a neolithic ranger and master flintknapper sent into the wider world to discover if this new "metal" menacing his tribe was a force for good or evil. Less well developed characters tend to be techies, weak in combat but always looking for clever hacks to get around it.

I'm always a sucker for technological metaphors. They're how I primarily tend to understand the world -- and therefore learning new technologies means learning new ways to understand the world. Being able to take that to a radical extreme is absolutely a form of wish fulfillment.

So, what's your story?

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophallation:

Apophallation is a technique resorted to by some species of air-breathing land slugs such as Limax maximus and Ariolimax spp. In these species of hermaphroditic terrestrial gastropod mollusks, after mating, if the slugs cannot successfully separate, a deliberate amputating of the penis takes place.

The slugs are hermaphroditic and have a full set of organs of both sexes. They have relatively large penises which, during mating, wrap around each other in a tight spiral. They sometimes have difficulty separating afterwards. When separating seems impossible, one slug gnaws off either its own, or its partner's penis, so that separation is then possible. No replacement penis grows, and the apophallated slug adopts a purely female function from that point onward.

Now you know!

This is making the rounds, but it was so cool I just had to jump on the bandwagon: a really impressive analysis of Choose Your Own Adventure books. I would have liked to see a bit more rigorous graph theory analysis, rating them by how balanced their trees are etc, but still just excellent. Somewhere I still have my copy of The Cave of Time, maybe in a box somewhere in Spokane. I should dig that out sometime.

In other news, I'm actually pretty excited by some of the last minute thesis results I got yesterday. Kind of as a lark and kind of to fill space, I decided to look at the distribution of sampling windows sizes selected in the randomized tree generation process. There were some slight trends towards certain sizes and offsets, so I did a complete run where the pool of random samples from which the trees get to choose were biased towards these distributions. And it worked! Not only did the output improve by ~0.5% but frame evaluation times dropped by up to a second. AND the evaluation times dropped in a really interesting way that ties into discussion of frame evaluation times from earlier in the thesis. Not bad for such a simple idea.

So this (or in French, since I read R-C for French practice) was my morning. How are all y'all doing?

(I'm a few blocks away, so I wasn't directly in it, but it sure made for a loud and exciting morning followed by a weird commute that involved taking a conference call while standing on a street corner (E 7th and Scotia, to be specific) because buses couldn't get through to get me to work.)

Lost: Slickety Jim's, Lugz, Militant Penguin, and a couple other things. A surprising number of my co-workers are in mourning for Lugz, considering how downhill it had gone in the last couple of years. But very sad, all around.

In other news, the cat has his flight booked. Cat cat cat :D :D cat. (Or :3?) After weighing the options, I went with a 2005 import model, so he's got a bit of a journey tomorrow. sonatine and Cody will also be up, so it'll be a fun weekend. Cat cat. :D

When I booked his flight, the helpful cargo staff asked if I wanted to sign him up for their frequent flier program for pets. I'm going to end this post on that just to let it sink in that such a thing exists.

Back to the Future: Still an excellent movie.

Tremors: Still a hawsome movie.

WTF: Back to the Future day is November 5th! How could I have not remembered that?!

Scary: We're only 6 years away from 1985 being as distant to us as 1955 was to Marty McFly.

I'm finding supervisor meetings harder and harder, emotionally. I've put so much effort into this research, and I've been focusing almost entirely on the thesis for 2+ months now, that I'm just a big bundle of nerves. Despite being absolutely desperate to finish this and get back to Seattle, I'm increasingly eager to produce a really polished thesis.

In other news, I think the battery in my ipod is dying. Which is annoying, but it's almost three years old. With moving parts inside! I still think the interface is needlessly reductionist, but I can't fault the overall physical design.

Today I finished my goal of walking around all 20 km of the Millennium Line. It took 4 sessions, but there was at least one major detour in there to do some OpenStreetMap surveying. I don't deny this makes me a bit weird, but it was great seeing all those backyards and industrial areas and other parts of town I wouldn't have seen otherwise. Plus, well, public transit nerd here. I just like being close to light rail infrastructure.

Worked on the decorative gear goggles some more, getting the frame entirely cut out. (Though not the eye holes therein.) Hard to find time to work on them, since I'm rarely home during polite sawing/drillpress-using times.

In the-future-is-crazy-awesome news: genetically engineering genius rats. And if that wasn't great enough, I looked up the original paper. They did, indeed, get funding from NIMH. I actually went "squee!".

In the lab, working on the thesis. I'm still at about 40 pages, and while there are still some graphs to be added, I'm reaching the point where I just need to write a whole bunch more. (60 pages is a decent target.) Unfortunately I tend to be very terse when it comes to technical writing, so it will be more of less of a struggle from here on out. Maybe I'll put together an explanatory diagram for the introduction.

Spent a lot of the day watching the health care coverage on C-SPAN. I can't believe it has actually passed the House! Watching the Clinton attempt fail was one of the first things I really paid attention to, politically. Even with all the flaws, just getting this far is amazing. It just needs to be good enough that no one will be able to get rid of it. I don't mind incremental improvements at that point.

Today was again cold and wet, but I tested something out. I wore one of my Utilikilts and also took along a pair of long underwear in my backpack. Before heading home when it was extra cold and wet, I put them on. (Easy enough to do wearing a skirt, of course.) Worked pretty well! I wouldn't want to do it for long excursions, but for getting home it worked just fine. This was my old pair of cotton longjohns; I have a nice synthetic wicking pair which would work even better in the rain but they were dirty. The kilt itself got a bit drenched, but it's thick enough that it wasn't a problem even though it is also cotton. I'm glad to have the option to wear a kilt in this kind of weather. And I do like the long underwear under a kilt look. It appeals to the grungy PNW guy in me.

Gmail seems to have decided that I'm in high school:

More about...
Ayn Rand
DND
Dungeons and Dragons
SAT Math Prep

Didn't quite kill anyone off at D&D tonight. Next week is the absolute final epic battle for this campaign, though. After 3 encounters already without an extended rest (so they're low on daily powers). And I gave two players Mummy Rot tonight. So... no promises.

Yup, it's winter in Cascadia now. Dark, cold and wet. As unpleasant as it can be, I really do love the sense of change. I love that we're approaching 8 hours of daylight again, and that I need to wear my coat all the time. I even love that I need to wear long pants, though that will fade quickly. And, of course, it's fun to watch the first year grads from other climates discover their SAD.

The Vancouver buses have started sprouting full colo(u)r LED reader boards for advertising on the sides. Which, fine, except they're painfully bright at night. Which is so stupid. They need to be that bright during the day, since the sun is so amazingly bright. I get that. But at night, turn down the brightness! This is trivial to do automatically and it would be 1) so much less distracting to other drivers, 2) more energy efficient, and 3) just polite, dammit.

About a week ago, vixyish and I hit our 13 year dating anniversary. Which is always nice to notice, but more importantly, we got married after dating for 6.5 years. Which means we've now been married for half as long as we've been together!

Happy 50/50, love.

I almost have all my graphs regenerated after the stereo snafu last week. Going a lot faster since I know what I want done this time, and switching to multi-process away from multi-thread has made a HUGE difference. Thesis status stands at 40 pages, without any significant advances made since the middle of last week. But my supervisor made me switch to an ugly new reference format which had the nice benefit of adding over half a page of length cumulatively. Getting into stylistic critiques of the thesis. I'm good at handling constructive criticism, but feeding enough resources to that 'don't be defensive, don't be defensive' background process can be draining.

Generally feeling in a fragile state. Had no desire for that last post to get so crazy, was moderately distressed when I realized how I came across. I need to be more careful of my language when discussing those issues. No one, including myself, can talk about them rationally, and they just aren't going to go away. It's applied science fiction: technology changes societies. I'd like to be ready for what's coming, but first I need to be able to talk about it without implying I don't want people to make money from art.

Still on my heavy metal kick after watching tfabris play Brütal Legend a couple weeks back. Suits my moods, recently. Never gotten into it at all before, so the change and expansion in perceptual quality is nice. Pretty happy with my Ümlaüt Pürgatory playlist.

There is a robot stumbling around behind me, slamming into the barriers in the test pen. So far it hasn't made a move towards me, so I'm just going to keep an eye on it in the reflection in the window and not reward it with attention. Ah, life in a robot lab.

The Google book search settlement is raising yet another fuss over digital distribution, so I've been thinking about it recently. Base assumption: our goal as a society is to encourage quality creative production, but the exact method is irrelevant. I think everyone is focusing on the wrong things. What follows applies to just about everything, but books serve as a convenient example. Let's break it down vaguely in order of controversy...

Production/Distribution: It is, of course, blatantly obvious at this point that distributing data in a non-corporeal digital form beats the pants off everything that came before. It's many orders of magnitude faster and just about infinitely cheaper. Anyone can do it. Everyone can now publish whatever they want to a global audience. No one can claim with a straight face that we need large corporate structures in order to achieve this goal.

Content screening: One of the unsung advantages to the old system was that it provided implicit quality control. Because publishing a physical book was so expensive, publishers wanted to get their investment back. If something was published, it had a fair chance of being decent. Maybe not your cup of tea, but not absolute crap, either. You were protected from the horrors of the slushpile. One concern with the new model is that, omg, how will we ever sort through the tsunami of material available? (Students of Chinese history will recognize this concern -- and the dangers that come from centralized "solutions" to it.) Well, it turns out this isn't really a problem either. We've developed lots of methods for ranking and recommending material. And more importantly, it matters less when these systems fail. If you're not paying for something, you're only out whatever time it took you to realize it was crap before putting it down. How often do you watch the first 10 seconds of a youtube video before going eh and closing the tab? The problem is solved by the same thing that caused it -- massive reduction in costs and even more massive amateur parallelization.

Content creation: This is where discussions start to get all emotional and pear-shaped. The simple truth is, I see no evidence that monetary rewards drive creation. (Except when the production tools are expensive, which was never the case for writing and is true less and less for just about everything else.) How many authors ever make a living at it? And even those that did, how did they manage to write before they were famous enough to make a living at it? The whole argument is ridiculous. It's even more crazy when you look at the unpaid material being posted constantly online. People like to create! (And that's a really good thing. I'd much rather live in a world where we didn't need to bribe people to be cool.) They also like to be famous, which I will argue was always the real external motivator. So, even though I'm going to be accused of wanting authors to starve to death alone in the snow, there just isn't a problem at this step. Things will still get written.

Editing: Finally, at this obscure step in the process, we run into problem. Going from a manuscript to a final book takes editing. (Also typesetting and cover design and other such things, depending on the final target medium. The same arguments apply.) Real effort, doing something boring and tedious and decidedly unsexy. Writing is sexy -- everyone wants to be an author. There are people who want to be copy-editors, but not usually in the do-it-for-free-cause-it's-fun kind of way. No one ever gets famous for being a copy-editor. Despite all the popular hysteria around the previous steps, this is where the new system grinds to a halt.

In the end, the question I'm very interested in right now is how to incentivize this kind of labor. If you're concerned with quality books coming out after the publishing houses finally go bankrupt, this is what needs to be fixed. There is no guarantee that there is a solution, of course. The old model is permanently broken, though. In the long run, selling data is for chumps. It's time to get over that and start making sure the new world order will be as awesome as possible.

(What, you were expecting answers? Solutions? No, just trying to clarify the issues. Sorry.)

Would you like to buy an O?



(Hint.)