Proseletizer neutralization, pointed out by Tom Lokovic.
Tenser, said the Tensor mentions
a Song Meme. Here's my list:
| Favorite Beatles song: |
3 way tie!
Revolution 9
A Day in The Life
Help |
| Favorite solo song by a former Beatle: |
Maybe I'm Amazed |
| Favorite Rolling Stones song: |
Sympathy for the Devil |
| Favorite Bob Dylan song: |
4 way tie! (all from the same album!)
Highway 61 Revisited
Desolation Row
Like a Rolling Stone
Ballad of a Thin Man |
| Favorite Pixies song: |
N/A |
| Favorite Prince song: |
Little Red Corvette |
| Favorite Michael Jackson song: |
Ben |
| Favorite Metallica song: |
Enter Sandman |
| Favorite Public Enemy song: |
Fight the Power |
| Favorite Depeche Mode song: |
N/A |
| Favorite Cure song: |
N/A |
| Favorite song that most of your friends haven't heard: |
Kurt Weill's Surabaya Johnny, as performed by Kathy Berberian |
| Favorite Beastie Boys song: |
Fight for Your Right |
| Favorite Police song: |
Murder by Numbers |
| Favorite Sex Pistols song: |
God Save the Queen |
| Favorite song from a movie: |
Third Man Theme |
| Favorite Blondie song: |
One Way or Another |
| Favorite Genesis song: |
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway |
| Favorite Led Zeppelin song: |
How Many More Times |
| Favorite INXS song: |
N/A |
| Favorite Weird Al song: |
The Saga Begins |
| Favorite Pink Floyd song: |
Set the Controls for the Heard of the Sun |
| Favorite cover song: |
Music for Airports/Bang on a Can Allstars |
| Favorite dance song: |
The Rite of Spring |
| Favorite U2 song: |
Pride (In the Name of Love), but many close seconds. |
| Favorite disco song: |
Donna Summers' version of MacArthur Park |
| Favorite The Who song: |
Won't Get Fooled Again |
| Favorite Elton John song: |
Rocket Man |
| Favorite Clash song: |
Should I Stay or Should I Go |
| Favorite David Bowie song: |
Space Oddity |
| Favorite Nirvana song: |
Smells Like Teen Spirit |
| Favorite Snoop Dogg song: |
Murder was the Case |
| Favorite Ice Cube song: |
N/A |
| Favorite Johnny Cash song: |
I Walk The Line |
| Favorite R.E.M. song: |
What's the Frequency, Kenneth? |
| Favorite Elvis song: |
Tie: Heartbreak Hotel, Suspicious Minds |
| Favorite cheesy-ass country song: |
George Jones's Brown to Blue |
| Favorite Billy Joel song: |
The Longest Time, many close seconds. |
| Favorite Bruce Springsteen song: |
Born to Run, a zillion close seconds. |
| Favorite Big Audio Dynamite song: |
N/A |
| Favorite New Order song: |
N/A |
| Favorite Neil Diamond song: |
I'm a Believer |
| Favorite Squeeze song: |
Tempted |
| Favorite Smiths song: |
N/A |
| Favorite Tragically Hip song: |
N/A |
Long phone messages consisting of background noise & random conversation, presumably from people that accidentally hit the green button on their cell phone & don't even know they're calling anyone. Or maybe it's really a group of minimalist conceptual phone pranksters passing my number around.
 Tim and I were arguing the other day about exactly what constitutes a UNIX beard,
and today I happened upon a picture of Ed Gould,
proprieter of the the original Unix beard,
on Declan McCullagh's web site.
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My patent, Motion blurring implicit surfaces, issued on November 19, 2002. I learned about it, not from the US Patent and Trademark Office, but from US Patent Certificate, Inc., who sent me a letter asking if I'd like to buy a nice commemorative plaque.
There's a scene in Pixar's new movie
Cars
that takes place in a courthouse. (This in a world full
of cars -- no human drivers, just sentient cars.) On
the back wall of the courtroom is the Latin motto
JUSTITIAE VIA STRATA VERITATE, which means "The road to justice
is paved with truth." Our family Classics/Linguistics expert,
Keelan provided the
translation. (But he's not mentioned in the credits, unless
I missed it.)
U.S. Patent #7129940, "Shot rendering method and apparatus", issued on October 31, 2006. Inventors are Rob Cook and Tom Duff.
All men are mortal.
Socrates was a man.
Therefore all men are Socrates.
(From Woody Allen, I believe.)
I wrote a program to search for word squares, and
when I told it to use Keelan's name, this is what
it found:
rakish
avesta
keelan
island
stance
handel
Avesta is the name of the sacred books of
Zoroastrianism.
If you buy a used car, don't give them your email address. The spam blocker at work is mostly pretty good, but seems incapable of refusing a dozen messages a day from car refinancers and extended warranty sellers.
US Patent number 6,677,947
titled Incremental frustum-cache acceleration of line integrals for volume rendering, has just been granted.
The inventors are Adam Woodbury, Rick Sayre, Tom Lokovic and Tom Duff.
Arthur Ganson makes mysterious machines.
I was born and went to school in Canada, where we didn't have any of that pesky first amendment stuff. So we recited (sang, some years!) The Lord's Prayer in class every morning. Religious adherence is tricky to measure, because there's little people like to lie about more than piety, but the best-justified figures I can find indicate that about 20% of Americans attend church services regularly, but only about 10% of Canadians. Maybe that compulsory school prayer thing wouldn't have the effect its advocates want. I say bring 'em on!
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(Click thumbnail for big picture.) We have a new grandson, as yet unnamed. Baby Evanini was Born January 1, 2009 at 2:38 AM at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia to Jamie and Keelan Evanini. He was 8 lbs 4 oz, 21-1/4 inches long, and perfect.
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This month's Monad.Reader has an interesting article by Yaron Minsky on adoption of O'Caml by a Wall Street firm for financial and trading software. Excerpts:
One of the things we noticed very quickly when we started hiring people to
program in OCaml was that the average quality of applicants we saw was
much higher than what we saw when trying to hire, say, Java programmers.
It’s not that there aren’t really talented Java programmers out there;
there are. It’s just that for us, finding them was much harder. The density
of bright people in the OCaml community is impressive, and it shows up in
hiring and when reading the OCaml mailing list and when reading the software
written by people in the community. That pool of talent is probably the single
best thing about OCaml from our point of view.
...
It has been my experience and the experience of most of the OCaml programmers
I’ve known that the object system in OCaml is basically a mistake. The presence
of objects in OCaml is perhaps best thought of as an attractive nuisance.
Objects in ML should be at best a last resort. Things that other languages
do with objects are in ML better achieved using features like parametric
polymorphism, union types and functors. Unfortunately, programmers coming
in from other languages where objects are the norm tend to use OCaml’s objects
as a matter of course, to their detriment. In the hundreds of thousands of
lines of OCaml at Jane Street, there are only a handful of uses of objects,
and most of those could be eliminated without much pain.
The Cornelius Cardew Choir's
(belated) May Day concert
happens on May 9.
My composition Revolving Door is on the program.
Holy geez,
this
is just unbelievable.
I don't know whether the tower of Babel prose, the bullshit criticism or the
hypernarcissism is the most jaw-dropping.
Here
is a 1954 letter from then-President Eisenhower to his brother. Note
particularly the fourth paragraph:
Now it is true that I believe this country is following a dangerous trend
when it permits too great a degree of centralization of governmental
functions. I oppose this--in some instances the fight is a rather
desperate one. But to attain any success it is quite clear that the
Federal government cannot avoid or escape responsibilities which the mass
of the people firmly believe should be undertaken by it. The political
processes of our country are such that if a rule of reason is not
applied in this effort, we will lose everything--even to a possible and
drastic change in the Constitution. This is what I mean by my constant
insistence upon "moderation" in government. Should any political party
attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate
labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again
in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course,
that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you
possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires,
and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their
number is negligible and they are stupid.
Here's a guide to a little-recognized literary genre.
Just for me, here is the documentation for the function keys on my IBM X30 laptop.
Our new grandson now has a name: Gavin Michael Franklin Evanini.
Susan organized a surprise party
for me on my 50th Birthday (December 8, 2002.)
Tim got me out of the house by begging
a ride over to a friend's house to pick up something he'd left there.
I should have suspected something when Tim & friend shuffled around
the house for 15 minutes and then pulled out a Beach Boys bootleg CD
and started pestering me for stories about growing up with all
that stone age music.
When we got home, the house was packed with friends. Lou Katz
took some pictures.
I received a nice pile of gifts, mostly books:
- The History of American Classical Music, by John Warthen Struble
- The Tao of Pooh, by Benjamin Hoff
- Uncle Tungsten, by Oliver Sacks
- Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser
- The Origins of Virtue, by Matt Ridley
- English As She Is Spoke, by Jose La Fonseca and Pedro Carolino
- The Lost Beatles Interviews, by Geoffrey Giuliano & Vrnda Devi
- Constantine's Sword, by Jame Carroll
So I'm set in the reading department for the forseeable future.
Take a look at this.
Apparently it's true, according to this:
The Onion AV Club has a decent interview with Ira Glass. Note especially his endorsement of TiVo:
The TiVo is really an amazing machine. Like everyone who has one, I totally recommend it. Just as everyone who's married will tell you to get married, and everyone who has a baby tells you to have a baby, everyone who owns a TiVo will tell you to get a TiVo, and they'll say things like "Your life will be completely different." It's true.
Of course, he has good things to say about public radio as well, particularly about the horror of pledge drives. I hate pledge drives too, to the point that I won't listen to them. Combined with my hypertrophic conscience, that means I don't listen to public radio at all, since I can't contribute and I'm not a freeloader.
I found
a literary appreciation
of Duff's Device at runme.org.
You know, back in 2000 a Republican friend of mine warned me that if I
voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions
of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I
did vote for Al Gore, he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things
didn't come true.
—James Carville (alleged)
My copy of Let's
Discover F Words (which I heard about at
Language Log)
just arrived. (It's a $0.79 closeout.)
Notwithstanding the hilarious title, it's full of charming ink and
watercolor illustrations in the Little Golden Book style by
Louise Gordon.
Google Maps,
which was already amazing, can now display satellite images
as well as conventional maps. Over lunch today, I looked for images
of all the major league ball parks. Here's what I found (there may
be mistakes, some of them were hard to locate):
- Safeco Field, Seattle, WA
- SBC Park (Pacific Bell Park), San Francisco, CA
- McAfee Coliseum (Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum), Oakland, CA
- Dodger Stadium (Chavez Ravine), Los Angeles, CA
- Angel Stadium of Anaheim (Anaheim Stadium, Edison International Field), Anaheim, CA
- PETCO Park, San Diego, CA
- Bank One Ballpark, Phoenix, AZ
- Coors Field, Denver, CO
- Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, Minneapolis, MN
- Kauffman Stadium, Kansas City, MO
- Ameriquest Field in Arlington, Arlington, TX
- Minute Maid Park, Houston, TX
- Busch Stadium, Saint Louis, MO
- Miller Park, Milwaukee, WI Low res map
- Wrigley Field, Chicago, IL
- U.S. Cellular Field (New Comiskey Park), Chicago, IL
- Great American Ball Park, Cincinnati, OH Low res map
- Comerica Park, Detroit, MI
- Turner Field, Atlanta, GA
- Rogers Centre (SkyDome), Toronto, ON
- Jacobs Field, Cleveland, OH
- PNC Park, Pittsburgh, PA
- Tropicana Field, Saint Petersburg, FL
- Dolphins Stadium, Miami, FL
- Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Baltimore, MD
- Robert F Kennedy Memorial Stadium, Washington, DC
- Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia, PA Is it the one in the upper left, or the under-construction area in the lower right?
- Yankee Stadium, Bronx, NY
- Shea Stadium, Flushing, NY
- Fenway Park, Boston, MA
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