Joshua Rhys Taliesin O'Madadhain

a Horrible review

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:59:35 GMT

As a fan (if not a rabid one) of a number of things Joss, I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon of people talking about The Latest Internet Phenom, http://www.drhorrible.com.

The singing was pretty good, if not spectacular. It reminded me (in terms of quality and of style) quite a lot of the musical Buffy episode, which is what I expected.

The sets and special effects looked kind of cheesy.

The writing was good, and very Joss.

I was amused by just how much Dr. Horrible's lab coat looks like my fencing jacket (at least around the upper body/shoulders).

I think that, from a story/plotting perspective, the weakest point was when Dr. Horrible got the word that killing someone was his only remaining option for getting into the Evil League of Evil.

First, because, as Dr. Horrible points out, it's just not very appropriate to a mad scientist. One can do all manner of evil things without killing someone.

Second, and most importantly: at this point it was entirely clear that someone who didn't deserve to die was gonna. This is, after all, Joss Whedon we're talking about. It could have been Moist, but he wasn't important enough to the story. It couldn't be Captain Hammer, because too many people would have cheered. It could have been Dr. Horrible himself, which might have been an amusing twist (especially if he'd been revived and then inducted into ELoL) but also sort of violates the "didn't deserve it" clause.

Who else is left? Yup. You guessed it.

Now, full disclosure: I didn't see it coming. But I don't tend to watch things very analytically the first time through...and if I'd thought about the question at all I would have realized that Joss had painted himself into that same corner again.

This weakens the fabric of the story considerably, IMO. I can deal with figuring out where the plot's going by making a smart inference or lucky guess...but I really don't like it when a given outcome is pretty much hard-coded halfway through the show.

So, you know, overall...eh. It was OK. If there were new 'episodes', I'd probably watch them to see if Joss could manage to make it good, but I wouldn't place a high priority on it.

Number of "Spore" creatures exceeds number of known Earth species

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:16:59 GMT

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hkRb0z0xS4kYqr3MVgFN6_eOspsA

Did someone activate the Singularity when I wasn't looking?

*boggles*

nanotech: super-strong paper and nanotube radio

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 01:01:57 GMT

http://www.livescience.com/technology/080705-nanopaper.html

http://www.physics.berkeley.edu/research/zettl/projects/nanoradio/radio.html

holy le crap, I finally uploaded Yet Moar Kid Pix

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 06:26:30 GMT

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jmadden/twins/

In this case, TEN MONTHS' WORTH. So we're practically caught up to present-day again.

Hope y'all enjoy them. :)

Warning: the twins are not getting any less cute. Those susceptible to such things should get their Joo Janta Peril-Sensitive sunglasses on prior to viewing.

Google's daily data in terms of grains of rice

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:50:30 GMT

http://blog.managednetworks.co.uk/it-support/googles-20-petabytes/

In a sense, what this is really doing is underlining just how little space a byte takes up these days...but it's still pretty impressive, and funny in spots.

"science made stupid"

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:39:35 GMT

http://www.besse.at/sms/smsintro.html

Put most simply, science is a way of dealing with the world around us. It is a way of baffling the uninitiated with incomprehensible jargon. It is a way of obtaining fat government grants. It is a way of achieving mastery over the physical world by threatening it with destruction.

and don't miss the tables and charts: http://www.besse.at/sms/tables.html

I haven't read the whole thing yet, but it looks promising. (And apparently won the Hugo in 1986. Heh.)

where the hell is matt?

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:33:19 GMT

All sorts of places, apparently:

http://wherethehellismatt.com

(Yes, I know that at least the first two of these videos have been around for a while. I still bet you won't watch the most recent one, at the very least, without smiling.)

an interesting article on birthrates and population trends

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:29:46 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/magazine/29Birth-t.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

A bit longish, but definitely worth reading. (Among other things,
they talk about the different kinds of trends in Europe that are
leading (or not) to declining birthrates.)

another "how many of these have you read" lemming

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 08:02:48 GMT

because I really need to be spending time FORMATTING TEXT instead of sleeping.

Some organization believes that the average adult has read only six of the works below. Don't ask me how they think they know this. We all know I have a Long Tail...let's just see how long it is.

have read
intend to read
seen film version
(started but never finished)
[read for school]

[001 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen]
002 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
[003 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte]
004 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
[005 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee]
([006 The Bible])
007 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
[008 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell]
009 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
010 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
011 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
012 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
(013 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller)
(014 Complete Works of Shakespeare)
[015 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier]
016 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
017 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
[018 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger]
019 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
020 Middlemarch - George Eliot
021 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
022 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
023 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
024 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
025 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
026 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
[027 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky]
(028 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck)
029 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
030 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame R
031 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
032 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
033 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
034 Emma - Jane Austen
[035 Persuasion - Jane Austen]
036 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis*
037 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
038 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
039 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
040 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
[041 Animal Farm - George Orwell]
042 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [can I indicate that I actually intend never to read something? I've read
part of a prequel to this book, and the author seriously is a hack.]
043 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
044 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
045 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
046 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
047 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
[048 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood]
049 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
050 Atonement - Ian McEwan
051 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
052 Dune - Frank Herbert
053 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
[054 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen]
055 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
056 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
(057 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens)
[058 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley]
059 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
060 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
061 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
062 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
063 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
064 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
065 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
066 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
067 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
068 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
069 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
([070 Moby Dick - Herman Melville])
071 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
072 Dracula - Bram Stoker
073 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
074 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
075 Ulysses - James Joyce
076 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
077 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
078 Germinal - Emile Zola
079 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
080 Possession - AS Byatt
081 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
082 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
[083 The Color Purple - Alice Walker]
084 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
085 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
086 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
087 Charlotte's Web - EB White
(088 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom)
089 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
090 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
[091 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad]
092 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
093 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
094 Watership Down - Richard Adams
095 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
096 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
097 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
[098 Hamlet - William Shakespeare]
099 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

* duplicates (included in other items on the list)
read for school: 16
read in entirety: 40
started, haven't finished: 7
intend to read: 7 (not the same 7, but there is some overlap :) )
seen in film or theatre production: 24

a reflection on the value and nature of state vs. federal legislative experience

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:53:52 GMT

http://www.newsweek.com/id/142892

I had no idea Buckminster Fuller was so...odd.

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 06:12:46 GMT

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/09/080609fa_fact_kolbert/?currentPage=all

(Which is apparently somewhat of an understatement.)

(I wonder what, if anything, he and Paul Erdos thought of one another?)

amnesiadust, this is for you

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:34:58 GMT

http://xkcd.com/439/

(It's also for a number of other people, including me--I've never actually jumped through a window in that circumstance, but it probably would have been less awkward than what I actually did in some cases.

But definitely for you. ;) )

"teach the controversy"

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:15:44 GMT

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/17/teach-the-controvers.html

heh heh heh.

for the Douglas Hofstadter fans in the audience

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:20:19 GMT

a recent interview: http://tal.forum2.org/hofstadter_interview

I did not expect his position vis-a-vis AI to be what it is. Perhaps not terribly surprising in retrospect, though.

(Note to self: acquire copy of I Am A Strange Loop.)

sheer video sillyness

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 05:24:53 GMT

I found this a couple of years ago and then lost it again; I just ran across it again. It makes me happy, so I'm posting it here so that I can find it again.

http://www.dooku.net

Click on the white rectangle a few times. Some of the musical accompaniment works better than others...but there aren't any particularly bad ones. Enjoy.

this page needs a "Make it so" button

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 21:00:44 GMT

http://www.fugue.com/pics/goodnews.html

(OK, I think that more HP novels would actually be a bad idea. Most of the rest of it looks good, though.)

von Neumann, call your office

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:43:54 GMT

http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/reprap_open_source_machine_prints_3_d_objects_including_copies_of_itself

Now if they can get it to _assemble_ itself, too...

mashup of "Firefly"/"Serenity", "Defying Gravity" (_Wicked_)

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 22:57:05 GMT

http://y-fish.livejournal.com/106512.html
lyrics at: http://www.lyricsdownload.com/wicked-defying-gravity-lyrics.html

("Holy mother of all that is sweet and buttery, somebody dropped the Internet on me." :) )

Pretty cool. Still not sure how much interest I have in seeing "Wicked", but if this is representative I might like it better than I liked the book (gasp!).

And note who commented first. (Wow.)

The Fall

Sat, 31 May 2008 00:18:28 GMT

http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/thefall/trailer/

Hmm. Looks interesting. Not quite sure what to make of it, but it sure is pretty, and doesn't immediately remind me of anything else, which is often a plus.

a naming convention whose time has come

Wed, 28 May 2008 19:28:29 GMT

So a few minutes ago, my boss came over and asked my advice, on behalf of another coworker, for what one should call the second-largest element in a set, given that the largest is called (unsurprisingly) 'max'.

I thought for about a second, and came back with 'penultimax'.

(Another coworker chimed in and pointed out that the third-largest element should be 'antepenultimax', which is one of the reasons why I like working here. It was later observed that everything after that should properly be lumped into 'preantepenultimax', which brought us back to LISP/Scheme's 'car' and 'cdr'...for which those languages already have a convention for combining, which may be just as well in the general case, as admittedly 'penultimaxpreantepenultimax' would be rather more of a mouthful for 'fifth largest' than 'caddddr'. Or maybe 'ca4dr'. :) )

The original requestor, sadly, was not immediately entranced by either 'cadr' (my second suggestion) or 'penultimax' as names, but this is one of those cases in which I don't care whether anyone else thinks I'm funny or not, I _know_ I am. :)

(It turns out (http://www.google.com/search?q=penultimax) that I'm not the first to think of this name, but I still think I rock. I'm just saying.)

where all the money is spent

Sat, 24 May 2008 22:04:52 GMT

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/05/03/business/20080403_SPENDING_GRAPHIC.html

A very nicely designed interactive graphic. As an associate observed, someone seems to have been reading their Edward Tufte.

Carter's energy proposal, 30 years ago

Sat, 24 May 2008 05:32:57 GMT

http://bsalert.com/news/2310/Jimmy_Carters_Proposed_Energy_Policy_In_1977.html

I've been saying that I've been looking forward to Obama being president (*crosses fingers*), in part because it would be nice to have an adult in the position.

I'd managed to forget that we already had one of those recently, and we didn't listen to him. *sigh*

(This doesn't change my mind. But it makes me a bit less optimistic.)

I am pleased to be introducing tiedyechameleon

Fri, 16 May 2008 16:47:51 GMT

Some of you may have heard me mention this "Megan" person a few times, often with a subtext of "love of my life" and always "mother of my children" and frequently "sexay thang" and generally "all around cool person".

Just to give you an idea, if you don't already know her well: she is the only person that I know of that has spontaneously invented an interpretive dance based on a dramatic reading of an Oracle database manual--on a bet, which she won. Fear her ingenuity, creativity, and determination.

She also kicks ass at strategy games.

Recently she created an LJ account with the handle of tiedyechameleon. Say hi--and be gentle, this is her first blogging experience. :)

Keith Olbermann to President Bush: Shut the hell up!

Thu, 15 May 2008 16:30:16 GMT

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/05/14/countdown-special-comment-to-president-bush-shut-the-hell-up/

No, really.

(This was prompted by Bush's recent comment to the effect that he'd given up golf as something he shouldn't be playing while we're at war. Yes, that's right: his noble sacrifice was giving up golf.

Except that he apparently lied about even doing that.)

fun with think tanks

Fri, 09 May 2008 17:07:01 GMT

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

An article on invention in general, and on its manifestations in Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures idea farm in particular. Definitely worth reading.