chanson

There's too much Scotch in this house.

That is all.

Poll #1490920
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 43

Thanksgiving!

Turkey?

Cranberries?

Football?

Dinnertime?

Black Friday?

Go ahead, tell me how wrong I am in comments.

The rumor mill gave us a vague, "people are getting screwed by redfin" today, but searching the internet I can't find any horror stories. Anyone heard anything?

Wikipedia now has a Climategate article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climategate that appears to be tracking the subject. It cites numerous articles at the end for review. The lion's share of articles appear to be main stream, or slightly off Broadway, media explaining what's going on, with interviews of players, witnesses and critics.

There are some opinions being voiced that this isn't a game changer, but I believe that this is wrong, in that the incident highlights how unavailable that particular set of data has been for verification. It violates an important tenet in research. Your findings must be subject to verification and criticism.

In a similar way, there have been special interests publishing their own research findings in their own "scientific" journals that, for example, the effects of BHA in commonly used plastics are harmless. But is the data available? Do they describe how they collected and processed the data? Do those findings jive with more recent findings that indicate there are significant effects on human males?

What is going to happen is that there will be spotlights trained once again on aspects of research publishing. More organizations will feel the heat of the spotlights, which in a way is very good for those organizations.

The problem with this particular segment is that the underlying data tends to be way out there. That's true for quite a bit of the data. The researchers have to explain how you can get a meaningful conclusion from it, and their work must face verification.

There's a groundswell of politically-driven speech denigrating the whole concept of climate change and global warming, the Kyoto accord, the up coming Copenhagen conference, and the current administration. My Twitter account is set to watch tweets from a variety of different sources; nobody is pleased with this incident, and there's now quite a few more people out there that believe the climate issue is complete hokum.

Climate in general is not a political issue, but climate behaving badly is. Statements by politicians predicting bad climate must be backed by real findings. Said findings may in fact be overwhelming in number, as described by one person cited in the Wikipedia article mentioned above, but they simply are not approachable by the general public (many of whom vote). That's a big problem for a political issue.

As such, millions of people tend to take people's word for things. If they are behind an idea, they are pushed into an uncomfortable place when an entire research unit like Climatic Research does something that looks boneheaded.

I would like to see the actual data being made available to other research organizations so that the Climatic Research findings can be verified. I would also like to see the research findings be made more accessible, plus the processes used to mine the data and reach the original findings. It should not be necessary for someone on the sly to copy thousands of files and make them available from some far flung server on the net.

Bona fide evidence for climate change must be brought into the light.

Susan swears up and down that someone on he friends-list on LiveJournal (which is a subset of mine, basically) posted a good recipe for christmas cookies and we've been going nuts trying to find it.

Mere and I are VERY fond of speculaas and kruidnoten; they are ginger cookies that are family pass-downs, and normally, I just buy a sack of kruidnoten (NOT the Frisian style) and speculaas at a store or online; Susan said that she wanted to make some, so I have been frantically digging around for a recipe. (note: my family background is 'lotharingian', but a lot of my food stuff interests come from the Netherlands and the Wesphalian area of Germany.

If anyone out there has a good recipe for these or had originally posted this recipe that Susan remembers being up in the last couple of months, please let me know. Thanks!

Best examples I've come up with so far:
http://www.kayotic.nl/blog/?p=5803
http://www.kayotic.nl/blog/?p=5698

And no, there's no existing family recipe around or anyone alive left to ask. *sigh*

I'm quite thankful for my loving family and friends... nothing else matters.

Being good local boys, Evan and Ryan from SYTYCD were featured on the Detroit Thanksgiving's Day Parade

Wednesday after work I went to Takadanobaba to hang out with this dude who I don't really know that is studying at Waseda but used to be an eikaiwa drone in Toyama a few years ago. Seems like an okay guy, wants to play Settlers sometime, maybe we will if we can find another person or two. We had dinner at Shakey's, so that was my first time ever going to a Shakey's... it was kinda crazy, very American-pizza-place decor, and we both did the all-you-can-eat deal for 1800 yen (it made sense if you saw the prices, a whole 12" pizza plus a drink would be more than 1800 yen, and this way you could get many different kinds). The pizza wasn't bad, it was actually fairly decent for Japan, but in the US there is no way I would spend $20 for all-you-can-eat of this crap. Though the deal also came with one soft drink and some fried chicken and french fries and a salad, so eh.

Thursday, today, is Thanksgiving. School kinda sucked for various reasons. I did tell the kids this morning a little about Thanksgiving (their reaction being "So it's like Christmas with no presents? Lame.") but... anyway, whatever, not in a public entry. I stayed late to sync timing up so I could see a 9pm movie in Saitama Shintoshin without heading home first.

Basically, at Shintoshin I knew I could actually eat turkey, see.

But what I had for dinner was a turkey sandwich on toasted wheat bread, with fries and onion rings, at Kua'Aina, the Hawaiian sandwich shop. Hooray. It still counts, kinda, right?

Then I did some shopping. First a stop in at Kinokuniya, where I found the college baseball magazine I'd been waiting for with the fall review, as well as a JR pocket timetable for Seishun 18 usage. Then, a stop at Uniqlo. I was originally just looking, not buying, but they had a sale and a whole ton of the long-sleeve shirts were 690 yen! That's DIRT cheap! So I bought 5 shirts. Two are actually replacements of older shirts of mine that look like crap after going through my Japanese washing machine so many times, but still. I got paid yesterday so it's okay to do a little shopping. We don't have Black Friday here anyway.

So, I saw the 9pm showing of Kaze ga Tsuyoku Fuiteru, or "Feel the Wind". This is a movie about a bunch of kids at a made-up college (I think) who are in the track club, only their track club doesn't really DO anything until one day their club leader Haiji recruits a new kid named Kakeru, and says, "Okay, club, we're gonna run the Hakone Ekiden!" and they all say "Haha you must be joking", except obviously then we have 2 hours of guys training together and bonding and eventually running the freaking race. There actually isn't really much more to the movie, to be honest. I mean, there is a lot of backstory -- WHY both boys quit running for a while (injury, conflict, etc), and there ARE 8 other guys on their track team, so the movie has to bother establishing all of those guys as characters and even gives a few of them backstory as well. The characters are actually really interesting and it was cool seeing the Saitoh twins again since the last thing I saw them in was Touch. And they have a token exchange student dude from Africa as one of the characters -- apparently international students running the Ekiden is a common theme. And the international student was played by Dante Carver, aka The Black Dude In The Softbank Commercials. There's also a token female character. But really... I dunno, I learned quite a bit about the Hakone race, I guess, but in reality, the only reason to see this movie is if you are either a Keisuke Koide fan or a Kento Hayashi fan, or are really into track and running.

Me, I loooooooooooove Keisuke Koide, so I was perfectly happy to watch him be himself for 2 hours and run a lot. Seriously. I'd never seen Hayashi before but he was pretty good too.

(More Keisuke Koide in 3 weeks when the Nodame Cantabile movie comes out! I've never read the manga or seen the dorama or anything but I might go see the movie anyway.)

Anyway, I still have a cold and a runny nose and it sucks. I'm going to sleep.

Frederik Pohl, a legend of science fiction, turns 90 today. Here's what I wrote on his blog:

Happy ninetieth birthday, Fred. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Thanks for all the books and stories; thanks for your part in building the now-sprawling edifice we call science fiction.

Keep telling stories!

Just the thing for your Thanksgiving feast: White Castle Hamburger stuffing to go with your turkey.  Mange! Vite, vite!

Yes, I’d use it for fun if we were having a weird-food-party this New Years Eve.  Which, unfortunately, we won’t.  (Mere and I like White Castle; its one of the odd tastes that I got from my Dad.)

We had a new record on Tuesday night: seventeen musicians showed up to play at Celtic Knot.

Towards the end of the evening, the three fiddlers decided to play J. S. Bach's Concerto (in D Minor, IIRC). As we discussed the introduction of classical music into an Irish sesium, John W. noted that it was perfectly legal to play the works of Johann "Seasmus" Bach at an Irish session...

Have a Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving and -- in theory, at least -- not being at work.

In practice, I'm looking at this merge which is up to 39% complete after running for nearly 24 hours and thinking I may end up pushing a key on it sometime before I head down to Chambanacon.

We'll see.

(and someone else is really slow on photo processing)

One of the little cooking tricks I do is boneless stuffed poultry. I learned how from Martin Yan's Yan Can Cook. You'd think this would be on da 'tubes somewhere, but I can't find it. Dozens of links showing him 'boning' (really quartering) a bird in 18 seconds, but not the thing I want.

I told icyfeetofdeath that I wasn't going to bone out the turkey, but I'm starting to have second thoughts. Time to decide in the morning, it'll take me 15-20 minutes if I decide to do it.

My last lap at the pool is underwater -- a length and a half most times, sometimes longer, for a max of 2 lengths (that would be at most 150').

Yesterday I was at the pool at a new time with a new guard, who suddenly realized that (a) the pool was too quiet and (b) he couldn't see me any longer. He jumped up to go find me and was relieved to see me surface. As he explained to me, swimming that far underwater isn't all that common of a feat...

• Majestrum
  • by Matthew Hughes
  • TPB, Night Shade Books, © 2006, 232 pp, ISBN 978-1-59780-089-1

The back cover touts this novel as “Sherlock Holmes meets The Dying Earth“, and it’s not far wrong: The protagonist, Henghis Hapthorn, the foremost “discriminator” of his time, is an ultra-rationalist detective in the Holmes mode (right down to the brusque attitude), and he lives in an era in which an age of science is coming to an end, to be replaced by an age of magic. The book diverges from its high concept there, however: This age is merely the latest to be ruled by science, and the pendulum has swung many times in the past (our own era has been lost to antiquity), and science still rules the day, although thaumaturges are popping up here and there, heralding the coming change. Moreover, Hapthorn himself has had several encounters with forerunners of the new age, and his most recent one turned his integrator (basically, his personal digital assistant) into a mammalian familiar, and also brought his intuitive side out into its own fully-realized personality which now shares Hapthorn’s mind. Although he tries to, Hapthorn doesn’t suffer this upsetting of his status quo with a lot of dignity.

That’s just the background for the book, which starts with Hapthorn being hired to investigate the new boyfriend of the daughter of an Old Earth noble, before coming back to be asked to look into a situation which could threaten the Archonate, the ruler of all of Old Earth. Hapthorn’s investigation explores some tangible clues involving a string of murders, as well as delving into murky details of the history of Old Earth.

Majestrum gets off to a slow start, trying to both introduce the many layers of Hapthorn and his world and get the story off the ground, but it ends up being a fun read. Hughes has a light touch to his writing that’s rare, especially among space opera type fiction like this; Hapthorn’s own dialogue is often overly ornate and self-important, but after a while Hughes starts poking fun at him for this, especially his signature phrase, “It would be premature to say.”

Hughes often seems to be evoking other stories or styles – Asimov or Piper style imperial space opera, Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently – but the novel stands on its own without feeling like a mash-up, and I assume the evocative moments are deliberate. Ultimately the story revolves around Hapthorn and his other self learning to live with each other, Hapthorn with the knowledge that the new age will cause him to fade away, while his sharer is not yet fully formed, yet they’re two sides of the same coin, a fact neither of them fully embraces. Hapthorn himself is especially resistant, since he requires evidence and logic and is unable to take his sharer’s intuitive leaps on faith or trust. This impedance drives the story’s climax, which was a little disappointing since it seemed to undercut Hapthorn as the hero. Although it had a nifty denouement and final line.

With some fine world building, intellectual sleuthing, and a witty narrative, Majestrum is a neatly constructed book which could appeal to a wide variety of SF readers. It takes a little while to get into, but the ride was well worth some persistence.

(Crossposted from Fascination Place)

It was an excellent night on the dance floor tonight...
( Read more... )

jeff_duntemann and Carol arrived in town this afternoon and joined us for dinner. Katie and Julie were delighted to see them.

Jeff and Carol survived despite this.

A fellow on why his favorite professor was a liar, purposefully and deviously.

Neat article.