No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow.
Saturday, July 31
Those Shounen Jump Series Just Never End
Yes, season 16.*
* For non-Billy-players, that means I've reset my character back to the starting point and worked my way up again 15 times. There are certain rewards to doing that... Albeit, mostly in the first two or three times you do it.
1
How are you doing on completion of stuff? Judging from your player ranking, I'm gonna guess that you haven't tackled r00t yet?
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Sunday, August 01 2010 05:57 PM (mRjOr)
2
I've done the easy parts of r00t and Pizza Witch. The last three months or so I've been so busy at work all I've been able to do is log in, run megamissions, and log out - and sometimes not even that.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 01 2010 10:16 PM (PiXy!)
1
Since you mixed your metaphor ("pull out all the stops"?) I'm not sure what you mean. I thought that was a pretty good episode, one of the better ones in the series. (Even though the bad guy in that episode was a joke.)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tuesday, July 27 2010 12:20 AM (+rSRq)
Broke my glasses last night, which is always a nuisance. I've only ever done it twice - once one of the lenses just popped out of the frame and hit the floor; this time I put them down a leetle too close to the edge of the counter in the bathroom.
So I went and got my eyes checked - yep, still two - very little change in the prescription except that I now need reading glasses as well as the regular ones.
The cost of the checkup was pretty reasonable, even with all the extra tests they run these days. (And the fancy gadgets means they don't need to use those horrible eye drops any more, which is a blessing.)*
The frames were pretty reasonable too, after I convinced the lady that the $99 frames that I liked were better than the (admittedly somewhat sturdier) $299 frames that I hated.
The lenses, though... Glerk.
I hope these see me through another eight years before I need to replace them.
* I love the widget where you look into the lens and it goes whirrr and a green blur resolves itself into a miniature farmhouse, entirely automagically.
Theres the Hannibal Lector frame that they ask you to plunk your chin into. Followed by the machine that puffs air into your eyeball.
Posted by: Andrew at Saturday, July 31 2010 09:57 PM (cB03i)
2
They also did one that takes a photo of the inside of your eye. Which involves a camera flash going off from about two inches away.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 31 2010 11:09 PM (PiXy!)
3
My optometrist does that the steampunk way.
She holds a lens up to her eye to inspect whilst shining a torch into the back of my eye.
Not to mention the fun of trying out bifocals with the lego spectacles set. It won't be too long before I join you in needing them.
Posted by: Andrew at Sunday, August 01 2010 12:46 AM (cB03i)
1
Could be worse. Could be exactly the same story eight times.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Sunday, July 25 2010 12:44 AM (+rSRq)
2
I believe it was almost the same story eight times. (Much as I love Haruhi, I haven't watched S2 yet.)
And I love time-loop stories as well. Particularly the Stargate version of Groundhog Day.
As for Amagami, the first arc of six just completed (each arc gets 4 episodes) and I think they handled it pretty well. Next week messy-haired girl is up, and she looks interesting.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 25 2010 02:50 AM (PiXy!)
1
Probably economy of scale. I bet the DAS is a special order, which has to be sheperded all the way through the production line, whereas the server is off-the-shelf.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, July 24 2010 12:02 PM (+rSRq)
2
I don't know which DAS you were looking at, but if it's the one we build which they rebadge (or heck, most any DAS)... there is quite a bit more to the thing than just a stack of drives.
Dual redundant smart power supply modules, ditto fans, redundant enclosure services modules, redundant internal loops, lots and lots of R&D. It is far more likely to choke itself on some silly internal coding error, than it is to lose your data due to hardware malfunctions... and it is very very unlikely to trip itself on coding errors. Not that they're not there... just that they exist primarily in remote boundary conditions.
Also, the drives will have special firmware, and possibly be the pick of the litter, so to speak.
Posted by: dkallen99 at Wednesday, July 28 2010 02:31 AM (1PFDl)
3
I don't think Dell do special drive versions, though enterprise-class drives certainly do have different firmware than commodity drives.
It does offer redundant controllers as an option, though I didn't configure that. Just having the option increases the complexity and price, of course.
The most expensive component, though, is the drives - Dell's drive prices on their US site are hugely inflated. They're actually about 40% cheaper if you buy them in Australia (though in Australia the rest of the server is more expensive).
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 28 2010 03:58 AM (PiXy!)
1
Meh. This sort of hyper-rationalism is usually more revealing of lacunae in the professor's rationalism than anything else. Given the gaps in the array, I'm willing to bet that the author is some sort of scientism-flavored Gaia worshipper, probably with a side of Animal Rights and possibly a garnish of Eugenicist.
Me, I want to know why there's Magick, Wicca, Witchcraft, and Neo-Paganism. That's at least two redundancies, and depending on your definitions, all four are variants on the same blamed thing.
Where's the animism? Pantheism? If you weren't trying to piss people off, you could replace the "Religions" with "irrational" doctrines of the religions, such as reincarnation, transubstantiation, transmigration of the soul, theism, "hard" atheism ("I *know* there's no god, [array of arbitrary scientific assertions] proves it!"), scientism, predestination, free will, etc. Some of the quackeries just seem to be practices which piss off the author - what exactly is irrational about trepanation, for instance? Where's bleeding? Or humour theory?
Also, I'm not sure if the "Zombies" thing is about people who expect Night of the Living Dead or the Haitian abomination, which seems to be a real enough practice of kidnapping and assault-via-drug-abuse & manipulation.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Thursday, July 22 2010 01:29 AM (jwKxK)
2
If you were to periodicise all the different categories of nonsense that our species has invented, the electrons in the outermost shell would exceed the speed of light.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 22 2010 01:42 AM (PiXy!)
3
Mitch's point is quite valid. The author included chiropractice. But my operating surgeon sent me to a chiropractor for post-op rehab, without which I would not be able to use my leg for years, or ever. At least he didn't include Climategate, probably the table is old.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thursday, July 22 2010 12:51 PM (/ppBw)
4
Chiropractors are insane. They believe in a magical energy field called innate intelligence and that all diseases are caused by distortions of this field by what they call subluxations which they fix via spinal manipulation.
Not sure what your operation was for, but chiropractors, when they skip all the voodoo, can be adequate physical therapists for some courses of treatement, albeit unlicensed and poorly trained for that role.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 22 2010 04:38 PM (PiXy!)
5
One should make a distinction between garden-variety chiropractors, who are by and large competent physical therapists with an emphasis on joint and bone adjustment, and the old-school chiropractors, who subscribe to the mad pseudo-religious cant that Pixy is talking about. 90% of the bad reputation that chiropractors suffer from are due to these lunatic quacks. It's *sort* of like psychiatrists and Freudians, but amplified three-fold. And kind of like with psychiatrists, people seem to get addicted to regular chiropractic visits. My supervisor is one of those inexplicable people who regularly go to a chiropractic despite not having anything obviously wrong with them.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Friday, July 23 2010 03:03 AM (jwKxK)
If they were genuine medical practitioners, they would have studied medicine. If you want to be a physical therapist, there are degree programs in that field that don't involve rampant pseudoscience. Or you can do the hard yards and earn an MD, and specialise in that field.
Or you can throw rationality and responsibility to the winds and be a chiropractor. They're not all lunatics, but they sure ain't doctors.
The field of chiropracty has no reason to exist. Where it overlaps actual medicine, it's redundant; where it doesn't, it's ineffective and potentially dangerous.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 23 2010 03:38 AM (PiXy!)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 16 2010 04:39 AM (PiXy!)
3
Who burned you? Walter Jon Williams just did a pretty good murder-mystery about that stupid craze from about six years back that featured large-scale email-style interactive puzzle-rollplaying. I'm not sure if it qualifies as science-fiction, since the only thing even remotely implausible is a rogue HVT widget which strikes me as more of a "five-minutes-into-the-future" than real SF. Especially since nobody's really talking about what exactly happened last May with that five-minute crash in the US markets.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Saturday, July 17 2010 01:15 AM (jwKxK)
4
I was reading the monthly newsletter from Galaxy Bookshop here in Sydney. Greg Egan, Ken MacLeod, and Walter Jon Williams all have books out this month with the same basic premise, and that's just from the authors I was actually looking for. Charlie Stross did it recently too.
So the new rule is, unless your name is Philip K. Dick, the topic is off limits.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 17 2010 03:34 AM (PiXy!)
5
How about movie adaptions ? Could we declare a moratorium on adaptions of P.K. Dick ?
Have you read Daemon by Daniel Suarez ? I've just started it. Pretty good so far.
Posted by: Andrew at Sunday, July 18 2010 12:07 AM (cB03i)
1
I love it that all these people are taking this "remix" so seriously.
If Firefly was on during the days of Airwolf it would more than likely
have an intro like this.
Posted by: Ben at Saturday, July 17 2010 07:57 AM (UrZ9Z)
Via Insty, Mort Zuckerman gets slapped in the face with the cold, dead trout of reality:
The hope that fired up the election of Barack Obama has flickered out,
leaving a national mood of despair and disappointment. Americans are
dispirited over how wrong things are and uncertain they can be made
right again. Hope may have been a quick breakfast, but it has proved a
poor supper. A year and a half ago Obama was walking on water. Today he
is barely treading water. Then, his soaring rhetoric enraptured the
nation. Today, his speeches cannot lift him past a 45 percent approval
rating.
Soaring rhetoric? When he's on (which is rare these days) Obama is wooden. When he's off (-teleprompter) he's simply inept.
To be fair, Australia's own not-late-but-decidedly-unlamented Kevin Rudd was not merely wooden but utterly leaden; his speeches were actively painful.
To continue:
The president failed to communicate the value of what he wants to
communicate. To a significant number of Americans, what came across was a
new president trying to do too much in a hurry and, at the same time,
radically change the equation of American life in favor of too much
government.
And they were right.
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Tuesday, July 13
Do Senators Make Bad Presidents?
I hold the U.S Senate of recent years in approximately zero esteem (unless esteem can hold a negative value) and it was some dismay that I watched the 2008 presidential campaign narrow to a choice of three senators.
But do senators intrinsically make bad presidents? Let's take a look at what jobs recent presidents held before election.
Senator
Governor
VP
Obama
Bush, G.W
Bush, G.H.W
Kennedy
Clinton
Ford
Harding
Reagan
Johnson
Carter
Truman
Roosevelt, F.D
Coolidge
Wilson
Roosevelt, T
McKinley
Nixon
That leaves out three from the 20th and 21st centuries - Eisenhower, who was a five-star general, Hoover, who was Secretary of Commerce, and Taft, who held a number of roles including Secretary of War.
So, in the last century or so, three men have been elected from the senate directly to the presidency: Obama, Kennedy, and Harding. So, one bad, one potentially great (if flawed), one incumbent. Unfortunately I'll have to rule insufficient data here.
1
The vice-presidency doesn't count - per FDR's first VP, it's not worth a bucket of warm euphemism. Also, the VP's only role is to act as a conditional senator for special tie-breaking and ceremonial purposes. Thus, I'd classify Coolidge and T.R. as falling into the governors-class of presidents, with Taft being a special case because of his immediate experience as a serial colonial governor. Truman, Nixon, and Johnson all get pitchforked into the senatorial claque, with Ford being the sole congressman in the list. Bush the Elder was also a congressman, but he spent far more time as a bureaucratic functionary, and his governance style definitely reflected that mind-set.
That tends to clarify matters somewhat, but the currently favored conventional-wisdom truism that governors' experience prepares for the office while senatorial time-serving ruins a politician for it founders on the rather violent exceptions of Woodrow Wilson on the one hand, and Truman & Kennedy on the other.
Furthermore, the side-theory that primarily non-governmental experience is worthless for the job is spun sideways by the twin contradictions of Hoover and Eisenhower. Hoover's primarily executive experience as the World's Humanitarian Fixer and Eisenhower's service life & apotheosis as Saviour of Europe produced wildly dissimilar White House careers.
I'm inclined to say that experience matters less than personality. Wilson was a ferocious, bigoted, narrow-minded thug, and his single term of office as governor of New Jersey had little bearing on his performance as president. Truman's time in the collegial Senate had little effect on his quietly combative personality and peculiar blend of tenacity and conditional flexibility. I rather suspect that McCain, if elected, would have ended up a second Truman, but obviously Obama has proven to be no such creature.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Wednesday, July 14 2010 03:45 AM (jwKxK)
2
Thanks Mitch. I'll do a new version of the table in the morning with the VP column excised. And always remember that Carter was the Governor of... Someplace or other.
Truman was an interesting character; I'd like to learn more about him.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 14 2010 04:56 AM (PiXy!)
I don't agree with that. The VP has often been a springboard to national candidacy for the President, for instance Nixon in 1960 and Humphrey in 1968 and Mondale in 1984, not to mention Bush Sr. They generally haven't been very successful at it, but it's widely viewed as a gateway.
Ford, coming out of the House, is a huge exception because he was never elected to the presidency. After Agnew resigned, which wasn't related to Watergate but happened after it, everyone knew that the new VP which would be chosen (through processes of the 25th Amendment) had a damned good chance of becoming President either through Nixon's impeachment or his resignation.
So the leaders of both parties in both chambers went to Nixon and pretty much told him that the only candidate they'd accept was Ford. He was House Minority Leader and was widely respected by both sides.
So he finished Nixon's second term, but when he ran in 1976 he was defeated by Carter, meaning that he and Rockefeller are the only Pres/VP pair in the history of the nation to not have been elected to the offices. And God Willing, it'll never happen again.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, July 14 2010 07:32 AM (+rSRq)
4
As you can see, Senators seldom make it to the Presidency. Most especially long serving Senators. They have to make too many concessions while in office. Concessions put them at outs with their own party. And most of them aren't "pretty" enough for the press to ignore what they have or haven't done while in the Senate. Obama had a huge advantage as he did absolutely nothing while he was in the Senate. (the Illinois State Senate never counted since the press completely ignored the fact that he was ever there).
I always find it amusing when a current serving Senator gets up and starts a speech saying "elect me so I can get things changed" - because being in the Senate would be the place to effect the most change. The President only signs what Congress gets to his desk.
I think you're looking at it the wrong way - it would be more instructive to look at the number of Senators who have run for their party nomination and never made it.
Posted by: Teresa at Thursday, July 15 2010 04:58 AM (ZjbN5)
5
Or simply look at the record of the Senate, to test the hypothesis that senators make bad senators.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 15 2010 11:47 AM (PiXy!)
6
Lately that seems to be damn near a given - no matter who the Senator might be. LOL.
Posted by: Teresa at Friday, July 16 2010 02:33 AM (ZjbN5)
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You're Listening to Radiolab
The question is, though, what is the name of Zoe Keating's "new piece that doesn't have a name" (as was). I just went to her site (cheaper than iTunes, offers FLAC downloads, and she gets to keep the money, or at least I hope so) and bought all her albums, so I guess I'll find it soon enough.
Meanwhile In C Remixed is $31.99 on iTunes Oz and they don't have their own online store. I'll probably buy it anyway. But they have Zinc (Zoe In C - Zoe Keating's contribution) as a free download, so naturally I grabbed that first.
Update: It's called Escape Artist. I actually like the version she recorded for the Quantum Cello episode better than the album track, though.
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Tuesday, July 06
Counterpoint
Angel Beats is... Not even
worth ranting about. The show only avoids being terrible by not having
enough substance to be anything at all. I don't think any of that
supposed potential was actually there - rather just an illusion of potential. It's pretty clear that no-one
involved in the project had any concept of how to construct or tell a
story, or how to draw faces or to animate, well, anything at all.
If they actually fed Haruhi and Shana into a Markov-chain Lua script controlling Maya and Vocaloid and streamed the results straight out onto TBS, then I give them a B for effort. If there were, unlikely as it may seem, real live humans involved in production, then they should be prevented from ever reproducing. You probably wouldn't need to put too much effort into that; just publicise the fact that they worked on Angel Beats.
I give it no nothings out of none.
Fortunately, there is K-On!!, which has a turtle.
Disclaimer: This review is based on watching only the first episode, since the show was cancelled immediately afterwards. In my universe.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Wednesday, July 07 2010 11:54 AM (+rSRq)
2
Wonderduck, actually, but more generally to anyone who thought this thing had any redeeming qualities whatsoever.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 07 2010 04:48 PM (PiXy!)
3
That means as a newfag, I shouldn't be here at all. D:
This show was supposed to be part of an entire media franchise: who knows there's going to be an extra DVD episode, a prequel light novel, a side-story about one of the characters etc. to fill the hearts of every otaku with hopeto milk the cash out of the otaku cow to simply illustrate how bad the franchise was.
Back to Haruhi 101.
Posted by: Hitoribocchi at Thursday, July 08 2010 12:43 AM (T+5m5)
4
If you only watched one episode, how do you know?
I'll admit I took the high road on my review (which, I'll point out, ends with "I cannot, in good conscious, recommend the show."), but I still enjoyed Angel Beats. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe the potential that I see wasn't there... but if I saw it, it's pretty clear that there must have been SOMETHING potentially deeper, even if it's in my own head.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 08 2010 01:25 PM (PiXy!)
8
And HMM had a squidbot, which is even better than a turtle.
-j
Posted by: J Greely at Friday, July 09 2010 03:54 AM (fpXGN)
9
IMHO, HMM was pretty bad and I was unable to complete it. Dropped about 6 eps in. But since everyone praises it (not just in this circle -- J.P. said that he "agreed with every word SDB said about it"), I permit an idea that it has something to it. But hey, tastes differ. And as far as expert opinion goes Angel Beats does not even have that much. The best they say is "unfulfilled" (except Tappan, of course, who really lets his imagination feed on this corpse of a show). The comparison with HMM only says to me that Angel Beats must be dire.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Friday, July 09 2010 06:28 AM (/ppBw)
Posted by: J Greely at Friday, July 09 2010 04:36 PM (2XtN5)
12
Eh, I'm with Pete here. HMM wasn't exactly Perfect Anime, I didn't finish it either. I say Mahoromatic is a better robot-maid show, hated ending and all. And Angel Beats is... not terrible. It lacks focus, and the first episode had some bad CGI integration issues, but overall it's a lot prettier than the not-very-good anime I'm watching right now - Fate/Stay Night. *That* sucker has some serious issues with uneven character animation and off-design blob-faces. It's pretty clear which scenes the directors cared about, because you can *see* when they couldn't care less.
I haven't gotten around to watching the last episode of Angel Beats, mind you. Maybe it's a disaster of Evangelion 25/26 proportions.
Posted by: Mitch H. at Saturday, July 10 2010 12:42 AM (jwKxK)
13Eva only had four episodes. Did they do a remake? I always thought it ended abruptly. Probably that got cancelled too.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 10 2010 01:41 AM (PiXy!)
If the major movie, television and music studios would just ditch iTunes and sign up with Steam, we could turn the global economy around inside of six months.
Today only: Every Humphrey Bogart movie ever made, just $1.99 for the set! The complete anime and manga works of Osamu Tezuka, $3.74!
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Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, July 03 2010 11:46 AM (+rSRq)
2
Very nicely done. I wasn't positive it was a spoof (as opposed to a scam) until the words 'telekinetic ability' came up. Good one. Thanks for the chuckle.
Posted by: Kathy Kinsley at Sunday, July 04 2010 03:51 AM (of4pL)
