Something I'm happy about: I decided on a whim to start doing, on the nth day of the year, n pushups and situps. I'd continue all year and, increasing my routine by one puny exercise per day, end up able to do 365 of each per day with no trouble. (It bothered me that 20 or 30 was the basic regimen in HS gym class and I couldn't even do that; I hadn't had any scheduled exercise at all, much less any anaerobic, in years.)

( Why I'm happy, why you might want to do this, why you might not want to do this, and how it's going. )

I am feeling seriously punchy, like as in punchamotherfucker. I do not see it going away any time soon. I don't like that.

In brief:

Me: gee, I haven't been to this gym in forever and my contract period is up, time to cancel.
Gym guy: sorry, we're out of cancellation forms.
Me: here is a signed letter cancelling my membership.
Discover: DERP DE DERP chargin you for de gym
Me: I dispute this charge. Here is the cancellation letter I gave the gym months ago.
Them: OK, we'll think about it.
Me: Can you reject future charges from them?
Them: Nah, you have to call us and dispute each one as it comes in.
Me: ...
Them: The gym says you are still a member and they never got the letter. We don't care what you gave them. Not Our Problem.
Me: ...

So:

- Work Out World, Gold's Gym, and other places that farm out their billing to ABC Financial are fraudulent. Don't do business with them. See Yelp for confirmation.

- Discover, as in the Discover card, doesn't even pretend to give a shit about customers.

Apparently the only way to resolve this is to report my credit card "lost", change the number everywhere I used it, and send registered mail to ABC Financial.

Yeah, bite me, CBS.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Unrelated, but this made me feel the same way a long time ago. I'm OK with it now.

Some friends of mine near Central Square keep ducks and hens in their back yard for eggs and companionship. A neighbor has decided that the birds must go, and has picked a fight through the zoning board: there are no rules against keeping fowl, but there is an "everything not permitted is forbidden" clause that is being used against them.

If they lose the zoning fight, the animals will have to go somewhere or they will be taken away and destroyed. If anyone has a back yard and is willing to take in some ducks and/or some chickens, please do let them know.

I get email from the American Family Association from time to time. Their current outrage is that the Speaker of the House spends too much money serving liquor to her guests when she flies:

Bob Unruh of WND wrote, "It reads like a dream order for a wild frat party: Maker's Mark whiskey, Courvoisier cognac, Johnny Walker Red scotch ... E&J brandy, Bailey's Irish Creme, Bacardi Light rum ... Bombay Sapphire gin ... and Corona beer."

Since (a) this is the kind of liquor Democrats blow their money on and (b) Republicans find it impressive and so presumably are worse off, I would like to invite you all to my house for the inaugural meeting of the Party Party. We will advocate drinking, hideously violent revolution, genocide of Democrats, Republicans, and MC1R SNP carriers, and more drinking afterward to celebrate.

At the party we will drink Cambridge Amber, homebrews, Hendrick's, Laphroaig, and Irish coffee made with proper cream and single-malt Bushmill's. Someone else can bring the rum and brandy.

IAWTP

Via pure_doxyk, a story (followup to this xkcd).

Someone with a great deal more patience and video-editing skill than I have needs to take Kelis' original "Milkshake" video and map it to appropriate snippets from A Clockwork Orange.

all the boys to the yard

Any Camberville types interested in the Amateur Poker League tournament at the Independent in Union Square? It's two Fridays from now. You play for points, not money, and it's free to enter.

I plan to go at 6 to meet the Boston Poker Club meetup group; the tournament is at 7.

Oh. (via vvalkyri) I know that blog entry is directed at someone else, but it drove something home that I've been stupidly missing for a while:

The health-insurance industry is pure rent-seeking. In general, when the environment is such that in order to do business (say, by selling goods out of your store or by selling your skilled labor in exchange for a salary) you must have some of a limited asset (like, say, a storefront or health care), the class of people and corporations who control the limited asset will be able to manipulate the market to capture all the profit: i.e., what you take home will be just equal to the risk premium that people in your situation insist on, no more (and, if you are less than perfect at your job, less).

So: every human being in the US jobs market: your health-insurance premiums are going to go up, not until you are perfectly healthy (liberal dogooder's dream) or everyone is as healthy as they think it's worthwhile to be (libertarian economist's dream), but until the health insurance industry is capturing 100% of the income you might otherwise be saving or spending on fun stuff. (And you still won't have good health care, because there are other people with more money than you, and the only way to capture all their money is to price discriminate.)

Prediction markets are unfortunately still underutilized. I would like to place moderate-sized bets on the rumors for the 27th:

- Apple will produce something with a large multitouch surface.
- It will not be called iSlate or iPad.

If any counterparties would like to go in on this, name your stakes and odds.

Sadly only 50% correct. (And it's awful. Giant iPod? Gah. It's like a self-parody.)

I voted for the Crook over the Shitbag because I remembered that I am a single-issue voter on the issue of torture, and the Shitbag has openly endorsed torture. There is almost an hour left, so I do encourage those of you remaining to get out there and support the Crook.

I feel vindicated in this decision by the fact that the Crook is already turning her pathetic excuse for a political career into the most hilarious train wreck since... [Wikipedia time] wow, actual train wrecks involve a terrific amount of human misery and are never funny. SO: the most hilarious train wreck ever.

I was previously operating under the assumption that there would be some difficulty in generating a primary challenge against her if she did, in fact, win, but given her dramatastic little falling-out with, like, her entire party up to and including the President of the United States, uh, she's toast. Nasty dry white-bread toast with phenylthiocarbamide on top and a side of ass.

May Scott Brown... I don't know, become a human being with a soul or something. Or spend 3 years in a coma, but win the lottery afterward to compensate him. Man, I can't even wish AIDS cancer on anybody anymore. Fucking milk of human kindness.

Few know that, after a chance meeting in Düsseldorf a hundred years ago today, J. R. R. Tolkien enjoyed a long and fruitful private correspondence with the great mathematician David Hilbert. Tolkien, like Lewis Carroll before him, was a lover of mathematical and linguistic games, but was also (in the great English tradition of arrant pedantry up with few may put) intensely devoted to semantic correctness in all things; and so one of his great concerns, as he developed his seminal Silmarilion, was with the technicality of whether the animate trees known as Ents were, in fact, nude. Does bark constitute clothing? Can ambulatory trees truly be covered with something that is, in fact, bark, or is it rather a bark-like skin, which necessarily itself be bare?

Ultimately, of course, Tolkien's constructed languages Entish, Quenya, and Sindarin must be used as the source of semantic distinctions here: it would hardly be appropriate in context to rely upon English-language definitions, after all. Fortunately, Hilbert had introduced Tolkien to the works of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, inspiring him to construct each language with precise logical foundations about which it was possible to prove meaningful theorems, and hope was held out that every statement about the language (e.g., "Enydi ier helda'") could be proven true or false by a formal process which would then be automated.

Further, in Tolkien's lifetime, Kurt Gödel showed that the provability of statements in any formal language of interest to be sharply limited. This work naturally inspired Alan Turing, a passionate lover of Elves and Men alike, to develop his own followup paper in the field now known as computer science, of which he is well known as a founder. Less well-known is Turing's post-war monograph inspired by the Hilbert-Tolkien correspondence, in which he applies a similar diagonalization argument to the languages discussed above and shows the aforementioned question of nudity to be ultimately unresolvable; it is titled

"On decidable languages, with an application to the Entkleidungsproblem".

Does anybody have a good idea for what to do with 110-proof anise liqueur? LUPEC lists several absinthe cocktails, all of which use only a dash or two, and then one in which it's mixed 1:1:1:1 and they claim the absinthe flavor is too strong. Since it's not the proper "this might kill you or drive you crazy" kind of stuff, I'm not too married to drinking it in the "proper" way.

(Not a huge fan of anise, as a rule, though I seem to have a habit of acquiring acquired tastes.)

In other news, gotta make some of this.

Just finished Wild Blue Yonder, a 4-page short story that is a very fine read. I think I got it from pure_doxyk. The story of how it was made is pretty good, too. I haven't yet gotten to its companion story, The Starship Mechanic.

The Republican is a huge douche bigot.
The Independent is a teabagger, not that there's anything wrong, etc.
The Democrat is a crooked authoritarian scumbag.

For me, it's down to:

- the Republican, who will fuck things up for 3 years but then lose to whoever the Democrats run in 2012
- the Democrat, who will hold office for life and make the world worse every day of it.

Sound decision theory required here.

GMail minus: from the text entry box, hitting TAB and then space sends your email.

GMail double plus: if you've turned on the "undo send" feature, it sits on your email for a few seconds/minutes after you send it, which lets you hit "undo" to fix the problem.

"To choose order over disorder, or disorder over order, is to accept a trip composed of both the creative and the destructive. But to choose the creative over the destructive is an all-creative trip composed of both order and disorder. To accomplish this, one need only accept creative disorder along with, and equal to, creative order, and also willing to reject destructive order as an undesirable equal to destructive disorder.

"The Curse of Greyface included the division of life into order/disorder as the essential positive/negative polarity, instead of building a game foundation with creative/destructive as the essential positive/negative. He has thereby caused man to endure the destructive aspects of order and has prevented man from effectively participating in the creative uses of disorder. Civilization reflects this unfortunate division."

—Malaclypse the Younger, (b. 1941-05-21, d. 2000-07-20) Principia Discordia, ca. 1958

via dglenn QotD

If you follow the local media at all, you're probably aware that Boston police object so much to their actions being filmed that they often arrest people on false charges in order to prevent it.

I will be impressed if anyone can come up with a plausible reason they would do this (and their superiors would support them), other than the following:

Boston police routinely lie in court and are afraid their testimony will be contradicted by video evidence.

The US Department of Justice is responsible for investigating and prosecuting cases of police corruption nationwide. If you are concerned about police corruption in your town, you can write to askdoj@usdoj.gov for help.

Massachusetts' own attorney general is, unfortunately, Martha Coakley, who consistently shows herself to be an opponent of transparency in government. She supports police and DAs even when they are dishonest and corrupt, rather than standing up for the rights of the citizens of the commonwealth as her duty requires.

On Tuesday, January 19th, she will be standing for election as a Democrat for the Senate seat held by the late Ted Kennedy. The election is fairly close, and the Senate seat is important to the health care fight, but I cannot stomach voting for Ms. Coakley.

I was a bit curious, so I went looking for calls for submissions in the short-form erotica market—i.e., the terms under which one can sell smutty stories.

The top of the market appears to be Penthouse Variations, which pays a maximum of $400 for a ~3000-word story: i.e., if you got published in every issue, you would just cover the rent on a single room in a shared apartment in a bad neighborhood within commuting distance of Boston, with nothing left over for trivialities like food, heat, and the like.

I was under the impression that multiple people lived lower-middle-class or better lifestyles off this stuff, but at per-word rates like this, the only people who reasonably could would have to (a) be producing about six novels a year while (b) producing in the top few percentile of quality. Am I missing something, or is it really that bad?

Google facing down China. This oughta be good.

Awesome night last night. Many thanks to y'all for making it happen.

As with the housewarming, there were 4 or so different social circles overlapping and mixing happily and effortlessly, which is a huge pleasure for a couple of (at least semi-)introverts throwing a party.

Also, I made ice cream! If you've never made ice cream before, you may think of this as a daunting and mysterious process: I had heard rumors that you have to get an ice cream machine, throw in a bunch of ice and (for some reason) rock salt, and then churn it endlessly with the crank and oh it's just not worth it at all. It turns out that:

- no special equipment is required
- it's really easy and takes only a small amount of attention once you grok it
- the results are great and totally worth it

( the process )

If you've only had store-bought ice cream, the intensity of flavors you get from having thrown a raw fresh(ly frozen) ingredient in instead of whatever it is one does in a large-scale ice cream factory is pretty mindblowing. I loved loved loved the results and think everyone should do this.

and it's getting wuzzier oll the thyme

A recent discussion in maru_mari's journal dovetails nicely with this LW post.

16, TITE STREET,
CHELSEA. S.W.

My dear Sir

Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility. If the contemplation of a work of art is followed by activity of any kind, the work is either of a very second-rate order, or the spectator has failed to realise the complete artistic impression.

A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse. All this is I fear very obscure. But the subject is a long one.

Truly yours,

Oscar Wilde

(via oonh)

Sherlock Holmes was nothing special, but Robert Maillet playing André the Giant playing Ron Perlman was worth his own clips reel.

Note to World of Warcraft users: Blizzard will give your personal data to anyone who claims to be a cop, even someone when they're in another country, without so much as a court order.

Have fun playing!

WTF is with the ever-increasing minimum username length limits on web services? For the record:

I would like my initials, please, if they are available. This is my username everywhere I have root and many places I don't. It is 3 letters long. It is the only username I have identified with for about 12 years. The only reason I don't have to type it 100 times a day any more is that most of the tools I use automatically fill in the username.

Since there are a couple other dudes with the same idea, I have a username that is not my initials and is, in fact, almost never used by anyone else. I used this for Twitter, because about the time Twitter came out, most places started wanting you to use a four-letter username. Since then I've used it a bunch of times, and I have the US domains for it, too, and, after a couple of years, I've even started to identify with it a little bit. A little bit.

And hey, there are now Twitter-derived services like whatsitsname the twitpodcast thing and mtile the whosywhatsit, and they require a five-letter username.

I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE. Seriously, whatever dick has decided that it's good policy to keep me from taking my username of choice: I hope a candiru lodges in your urethra.

Current Location: pissyland
Current Mood: pettily vindictive

Oh the Confluence LaTeX plugin bone is connected to the... JVM bone!
and the JVM bone is connected to the... Crowd bone!
and the Crowd bone is connected to the... keystore!
and the Confluence LaTeX plugin bone is also connected to the... TeTeX!
and the TeTeX bone is connected to the... a 32-bit syscall!
and the 32-bit syscall returns EOVERFLOW when the filesystem is over... 2TB!
and the TeTeX bone needs to be... recompiled!
but in the meantime the Confluence temp directory bone needs to be... moved and symlinked!

Paging Rube Goldberg; Rube Goldberg to the white courtesy phone.

In case anyone's keeping track, that's one RT ticket in, one Atlassian support request, 2 hours of research and debugging, a bit of strace, a CSW bug, and a hack in a directory tree; but now it works.

When you're a novice in a field and you're coming to enjoy the field and acquire its core skills, you may encounter a problem, precisely analogous in its formulation to something you find trivial in another field, that here seems impossible—or just unreasonably difficult, or solvable but only by doing violence to the idiom of the field. You're frustrated, of course, but, recalling that you're a novice, you decide to ask for help from the wiser and more experienced, or maybe just bitch that it can't be done in the hope that someone will show you up.

They scoff: "of course it's possible; you just..." and it's something you've tried, and you show them why it doesn't work. They laugh it off: "well then you just..." and again. Perhaps a few more times. And ultimately they concede that you're right, there just isn't a way to do it.

You are disappointed, of course, that there isn't a good solution; and you're satisfied, of course, that you weren't mistaken, and that the people who were telling you you were were wrong. Even upon reflection, you can't tell which predominates.

I am naming this feeling "haskell".

Current Mood: haskell

SIPB types and thermodynamicists alike will be glad to know that I have acquired a drinky bird for my office. I spent some time last week trying to arrange a water dish for him at just the right height using only objects on my desk, but apparently the indoor weather here is not quite right to keep him moving at any kind of respectable pace.

I fixed this just now by perching him on top of the external hard drive attached to my Mac. The waste heat from the drive keeps him going, no water required; in consideration of this Stirling achievement, I have dubbed him Tantalus. (I have not yet dared to put a water glass right next to the open drive vents for maximum authenticity.)

With the drive asleep, he "drinks" perhaps every couple of minutes. If I keep it busy, on the other hand, he gets 3-6 (somewhat chaotic) rpm.

Human beings are a disease, a
cancer of this planet. You are a
plague. And we are...

May I just say that this page is pure hilarity?

If my hypothetical wife came into the bedroom wearing these, I would burst out of the closet in a clown outfit and uglies would be bumped, I tell you what.

via chipuni and vito_excalibur (who has lively discussion)

- blogger comes out as female
- "He Must Be Joking" (FSP is someone I've already been reading for a while, and is worthwhile for several different reasons)

Less enragingly, Mesopotamian humor from the Onion.

In case you're wondering why cyclists might be a tad aggressive and irritable from time to time, a major contributing factor is that police do not enforce the law when the victim is a cyclist.

- San Francisco police, presented with a license plate photo and two witnesses to felony hit-and-run by a driver against a cyclist, are completely disinterested.

- If I ride from home to work, a distance of about 4 miles, I will witness 10-20 traffic violations by motorists and 5-10 by cyclists. ( cyclists get cited; motorists don't )

- maru_mari's bike was stolen from Davis Square last night. This involved a group of people hanging around for at least several minutes sawing away at her cable lock in plain sight in a high-traffic area. A witness called the local police. The local police made a note and forwarded the call to the transit police, who did not respond.

(For those not familiar with the area: Davis Square is a principal business district of Somerville and I doubt there are ever not 2-3 cops within a couple of blocks.)

One of my minor life goals is to replace all 150 of my Livejournal interests with interesting numbers. Got 7 so far.

Ones I share with other people:

∞ is infinity
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0 is a number that is illegal to possess in the US
28:06:42:12 is Darko's Constant
4:8:15:16:23:42 was a fun half-season show that I think is in its, what, 8th season?

Ones nobody else has gotten into yet:

4726340 is the Sun bug ID requesting Tail Call Optimization in the JVM
567-68-0515 is Richard Nixon's social security number, which is what you should give when anyone asks you for a social security number when it's none of their damn business

and 808017424794512875886459904961710757005754368e9 ("e9", meaning "x10^9", is because the limit on the length of interests prevents me from putting all nine zeroes on the end) is the size of the Monster Group, which is the largest finite simple group outside of the infinite families of simple groups (sporadic group). (By the way, the complete classification of simple groups is one of the more astonishing results in mathematics. Everyone should learn enough mathematics to learn (a) how astonishing it is and (b) how it was done; then nobody could ever be unhappy for long.)

The lack of interest in Nixon's Constant surprises me: that one's been going around since he was President, if not before.

The next couple of numbers I want to add have been problematic: I'd like to add Chaitin's Constant Ω and the 5th Busy Beaver number Σ(5), but since the former is impossible to compute numerically and the latter would take an absurdly long time, I would have to represent them by their symbols, and you can't put uppercase Greek letters in your interests.

Anyway, if you've got any interesting numbers, feel free to share them.

via nightspore: here is what Google thinks you like (i.e., more or less what ads it will show you).

Amazingly sweet thing: you can edit it. Also sweet: you can opt out and they will not collect your preferences.

I agreed with Google about what I like, but I also told it about some more things, mostly bio stuff and outdoorsy stuff, which interest me but I don't send a lot of email about.

Hey oonh and stronae and people like that: I know we all read reddit, but still: roots of polynomials with integer coefficients. Dig it.

OK, guys. The liberal/skeptic/humanist/atheist thought cluster is one I generally endorse. At the liberal end, there's a lot of good art to be had. But, setting aside the Symphony of Science (which is, in any case, a novelty act), if I look at PZ Myers or show up to Skeptics in the Pub, the music SUCKS. It shames us all.

I'm going to mention a couple of names. I'm not giving them links, but you can Google as well as I can:

Roy Zimmerman. What the fuck?
George Hrab, knockoff of Roy Zimmerman. What the FUCK to the power of WHAT the fuck?

Look, I like being pandered to as much as the next guy, but seriously, in public: if you can't sing, don't. If you can't write lyrics, don't. If you can't play the guitar, PLEASE GOD do not.

or, The TV Show:



(via ceruleanst, who makes my favorite permahiatused comic and awesome ambigrams)

I just got a robocall for Martha Coakley on my cell phone (via my Google Voice number, which is in a Cambridge exchange delegated to Level3 Internet Services). Way to go, Martha!

(Ms. Coakley is the Massachusetts Attorney General. She is running for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in the special election on Tuesday. Her credible opponent is my Congressman, Michael Capuano, and there are a handful of komedy kandidates.)

For the record, the reasons I am voting for Capuano instead of you:

(1) You were a DA and are now attorney general. Your job has been to argue on behalf of the state and to put people in jail. I guess we need people to do that, but I don't think the traits that make you want to do that make you a good person to represent me in the Senate.

(2) Capuano has extensive legislative experience, most of it on my side, and you have nil.

(3) You robo-called my cell phone.

Go away, Martha!

Now trying to figure out if I can get a Capuano yard sign mounted on my motorcycle.

Fucking hell.

maru_mari brought me back a solid copper ball from Albuquerque last night. It's a bit more than an inch in diameter and maybe 6 oz., much denser than any object I have handled for a while (other than my ring, which is almost twice as dense but much smaller). It's really fun to roll around in my hand and I've been playing with it idly all day when I'm not typing, which is probably a good way to prevent repetitive stress injury.

Earlier, the dog wanted me to throw it for her, but I decided against it. Dog dentists are expensive.

Everyone should have a solid copper ball!

Current Mood: do not taunt solid copper ball

I usually like Reddit, but the evil racist and classist shit popping up all over this thread is nothing short of appalling, and makes me ashamed to be human. (At least people are disputing and downvoting those comments. But damn.)

( Much suffering, tentatively relieved )

Poll #1492474
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 4

At this moment, are you street-legal?

Update: made it all the way home with no push-starting, so the battery isn't discharging itself terribly while the bike's parked. Wondering now if it's all these short trips decreasing the ratio of starting-juice-consumption to running-and-charging. Anyone game for a multi-hour trip before winter sets in for real? It would be nice to go for a long ride to make sure everything stays running, but it would be even nicer to do it with someone who can give me a jump if it doesn't.

Poll #1491457
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16

The Quaker Oats "Go Humans Go" campaign is mainly about...

Poll #1491288
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 10

What do you want?