After many recommendations, we've begun watching season one of The Wire. For those of you who don't know this is a police drama from HBO by David Simon. Simon explains in the commentary that he and his writing partner Ed Burns wanted to explore the theme of institutional betrayal. The first season follows two sets of characters: One set in a gang of murderous drug dealers preying on several addiction and poverty-stricken neighborhoods the other is a strained police department which begrudgingly puts together a detail of narcotics and homicide detectives and other misfits to try and break up the gang and arrest it's leaders.

By some coincidence I happen to be reading Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly at the same time. Here Philip K. Dick explores the derangement of a policeman who is given the assignment of gathering evidence on his undercover identity as a drug addict at the same time, his drug of choice, "Substance D," has split his mind to carry out his dual roles while only vaguely aware of each other.

I was reading about cell phone novels on metafilter and the idea intrigues me in the abstract but I can't say what it is exactly I like about it. Perhaps it's just some kind of ADHD resonance.

Recently someone recommended Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World to me. This evening I picked it up at the store and started reading the first page. I was not instantly hooked.

Early this week, I half-jokingly-half-seriously tried to encourage some co-workers to read James Joyces' The Dead for Jan 6, the Epiphany, which I called "Day of The Dead." I got some interesting responses. One was initially enthusiastic about the project and started reading it but her interest quickly waned and has since gone on to other readings. One read it in college and hated it and didn't feel like reading it again. One thought the joke was funny but made no other effort in this game. One really loved the story Araby which she read while in Galway, and the thought of it takes her back to those times, but hasn't read any other stories in Dubliners and isn't going to anytime soon. My own efforts in this project are like the first person I described.

In the interest of getting some laughs in what has been pretty bleak season all-in-all I have gone back to my youth and have been rereading my surviving copies of Gordon Korman's books (Official website [warning: ugly]. Wikipedia entry). Gordon Korman was my favorite author when I was a kid. I was always inspired by the fact that he was a published novelist when he was the same age I was when I was getting into his books. Of the many books I once had of his, only four survive on my shelf: This Can't be Happening at Macdonald Hall (1978), Who is Bugs Potter? (1980), I Want to Go Home (1981), No Coins, Please (1984). Still hilarious. Unfortunately I'm missing about four or five pages out of the end of Who is Bugs Potter?. It's interesting to see that he's written so much other stuff since I last read anything by him. I wonder what it's like?

I'm more and more interested in mathematics these days. I've been working on a kind of mathematical puzzle and computer game and honing my skills in Python. I've read that people under stress crave order and for me, dealing with day-to-day stress I find that math and computer programming is good stress relief. It feels strange to say this.

I believe association is the fundamental operation of thinking and that brains are collectors of associations. I believe brains are not rational, but a brain can simulate it with training. In many ways, for the last few years, I've had hardly any experiences similar to the ones I'd had for the ten years prior. Although all of the old memories remain, such new ones have come that I feel ... lopsided. I don't wish to suggest anything about this, either bad or good. It's is simply a branching of self. Times are such that I don't wonder what it means as much as I wonder how I can make money from it.

So, the unit circle is pretty handy, but there are some angles I've always wondered about and don't have the skillz to figure out.

1. The Pythagorean formula (x² + y² = z²) has solutions in natural numbers when x and y and z are multiples of 3, 4 and 5 (9 + 16 = 25). As typically expressed in radians (in terms of π), what are the angles of this triangle?

2. A right triangle of with an angle of 1 radian has an opposite angle of (π - 2)/2. What are the sine and cosine of angle 1 rad? I don't mean the calculator value, but what irrational fraction yields that value?

To try and answer these I looked up the sine function to see what it actually does and I'm afraid I don't understand it.

What follows is a short list of vegetables which are also available in purple, blue, or dark red.

I dreamed up an amalgam of every Saturday morning cartoon show with this theme song:

In the frontiers of space full of outlaws and bandits
     Sheriff Princess Miller!
Is the only one who stands for justice and order
     Sheriff Princess Miller!
How can she do it with only paws for hands?
     Sheriff Princess Miller!
With her robot butler and her trusty friends!
     Sheriff Princess Miller!

The opening features a wagon-train of spaceships rumbling through an asteroid field, when out of the asteroids appear these villianous figures in spacesuit/cowboy&indian outfits. We can tell they're bad guys because they're ugly, and, with each dramatic pose, Wanted Posters appear to frame their faces like halos. Just as the bad guys are about the attack the spaceship wagon train, Sheriff Princess Miller, a fox-like humanoid, not unlike Maid Marion of Disney's Robin Hood appears, looking sternly at the bad guys, fists on her hips, her princess dress and train flowing in the space breeze, her sheriff's star twinkling. The bad guys turn and point their six shooter lasers at her. She draws her own firearm but without opposable thumbs or articulate digits she fumbles and the gun slips from her hands. Just then, an android in a tuxedo leaps from the wagon train, and levels a large Megatron-like cannon at the bad guys, shortly after an assortment of well armed other figures, animal, human and machine appear from the wagon train and other asteroids. They blow up the bad guys and a hail of laser fire and from out of the smoke and light emerge a marching phalanx of good-guys with guns lead by ... Sheriff Princess Miller!

The few times we've prepared cauliflower for something it's been in the borderlands between bland and gross. The times I remember enjoying cauliflower have been with broccoli and cheese and, at least once in minestrone. Anyone have any suggestions for preparing cauliflower that takes best advantage of it's flavor?

I have a few ideas. Cauliflower seems like it should be good with the same kinds of things potatoes are good with: broccoli, butter, & bacon bits! with chives? Perhaps it could be prepared in someway like hashbrowns, dowsed with pepper and ketchup and served with eggs and toast? Might it be roasted with garlic? Go with the bland and make cauliflower leek soup? With mushrooms?

Venturing beyond, what do you make of these?

I can't think of a food that I wouldn't eat under Thai yellow curry.

Likewise, cauliflower and veggies on jasmine rice, with an korma sauce, Indian style.

Cauliflower, garlic, olive oil & balsamic, dusted with cumin and wrapped in a grape leaf.

Cauliflower, tahini, paprika and red pepper flakes, on a pita, side of tabouli, kibbe.

Cauliflower and that butter and brown sugar sauce some Italian places put on squash.

WALL-E is a lonely trash compactor, apparently the sole survivor of a massive effort to clean-up on a future Earth, ruined by trash. He collects interesting bits of trash from the long-gone human civilization and is obsessed with the movie Hello Dolly, otherwise he keeps a rigorus schedule of collecting trash, compacting it into cubes, and building towers. Oh, and he dodges windstorms. One day, WALL-E meets EVE, a scout robot sent to earth to look for plant life. WALL-E falls in robot love with EVE. EVE likes WALL-E enough but doesn't understand. WALL-E gives her a plant which causes EVE to clam up and switch into a beacon mode. WALL-E doesn't understand this but takes care of her. When EVE is recalled WALL-E hitches a ride to go after her. WALL-E finds himself on a giant resort ship of humans and their caretaker robots who have fled earth waiting for the clean-up effort to report some positive results. While WALL-E tries to court EVE he uncovers a conspiracy to keep the surviving humans in space indefinitely.

This morning I dreamt I was in a faraway land, and after some social gaff, I was challenged to this chess-like game. The board was ten feet square, there were sixty large, ornate pieces to a side made of blown glass. There are lions, dragons, emperors, princesses, monks, slaves, also, cannons and a few others. For the beginner version of this this game there was a labyrinthine set of rules beginner players are supposed to memorize and play by otherwise judges berate them mercilessly.

Opponents pieces may killed or enslaved. No piece may be promoted. Enslaved pieced do not retain their old powers, they're just slaves. You can exchange princess. Princesses unlike queens, don't move at all but stay on the same square the whole game unless they're exchanged whereupon they stay on their corresponding squares. The exchange doesn't have any strategic value but raises the stakes: the victor is more honored, the loser is more ridiculed. The game ends when you kill or enslave your opponents emperor. Enslaving the emperor is the more highly rated victory. Losing players often play their entire endgame trying to have their emperor killed rather than enslaved.

I was challenged to the advanced game. In the advanced game there are no rules. You command and bully lackies (usually beginning players who are still studying the rulebooks) to move the pieces for you, wherever you feel like moving them. You have to act as aggressive and macho and tyrannical as you can. A committee of judges analyze and rationalize every move and the manner in which you move it. Their conclusions about the game indicate how you are supposed to act on your turn. There's a coup-de-grace move, sort of like checkmate, where you grab one of your own pieces (after having not touched them the entire game) and throw it on the ground smashing it to pieces. Losers of the advanced game are humiliated by being demoted to beginner, that is if they ever play again.

I was doing very poorly until I woke up.

Although the animation is gorgeous, The Secret of NIMH is not as good as Ratatouille.The mystical element subverts the courage and ingenuity of Mrs. Brisby. I'm pretty sure this wasn't in the book. But then again, almost all the "good" characters in this movie are alloyed with tragic flaws. Mrs. Brisby and her kids seem to be the only ones who seem untarnished.

I don't remember when I first came across this quote but lately I've been thinking about it a lot:

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? — Brian Kernighan, The Elements of Programming Style

The more I think about this the more I also think that I've gone about almost everything I've set out to do in my life, all wrong.

A few years back I started getting ideas for a sci-fi novel: a picaresque romp around a post-human solar system as I imagined might come about in about 200 years.

This weekend I finished Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix (actually Schismatrix Plus which includes the short stories written in the same setting). I've had the distressing feeling since I started this book that I read it sometime before this and forgot about it, because Sterling had all my good ideas about 15 years before I did. Actually I don't know why this should distress me that much because I was stealing my ideas from John Varley. Sterling just beat me too it.

Anyway Schismatrix is pretty good overall. I see a lot of similarities to it in other books I've liked, like Ken Macleod's The Stone Canal.

I instantly loved the song Business Time when first saw the video. It sounded familiar. I remembered that one night K and I couldn't sleep so we got up and watched Conan O'Brien and the same two were performing Something Special for the Ladies (official video).

Who are these guys? They're Flight of the Conchords and they're awesome. I probably hardly need to say anything about them since they're getting more and more popular just now. They've had an HBO show, and I blinked and they won a Grammy back in February.

Links.

• Official Site
• Fan Site
• HBO Site
• MySpace
• Wikipedia entry

Anyone know how Evan Almighty starts and ends?

After almost half a year I have to bring back The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature by Philip Ball (blog). I'm glad that someone else is interested in this book and this subject. I'm sad that I'm parting with it. I finished reading it a while back but I really wanted to finish going back over it listing all the interesting things in it for follow-up. I should get my own copy.

In chapter 1 he talks about how patterns arise from "symmetry breaking". Symmetry in nature though arises in conjunction with random action rather than orderly ones. When there is are constraints on an otherwise random activity, that's when patterns form. The book goes on to describe an astonishing range of phenomena and how we understand them in terms of the basic forces in operation and the characteristic patterns (or non-patterned chaos) they form. It's awesome in the truest sense of the word. A lot of the phenomena talked about is everyday stuff you see in the kitchen, bathroom, and backyard. The appendices describe some experiments you can do in your garage.