Author: admin

I have realized that the most fun way to do Widget Wednesdays is to actually do them on Wednesdays. I guess I could work in advance, build something up gradually over time, and I’ve tried that.

But it is not nearly as much fun. The thrill of having to write a complete program, get it working, do all the design tweaks, and present it for you to play with, is its own form of very high order recreation.

I’ve been enjoying this high wire act, waiting until the day, and then striking all at once. I realize that the results are less like symphonies and more like haiku. But hey, I like haiku.

Continuing with the grid theme, I was wondering what would happen if, in my recent seven sisters example, each of the moving squares were to leave a trail. This would give a better sense of how things are moving over time. Also, they would then have interesting shapes, and therefore become more like creatures.

One thing led to another, and I ended up increasing both the size of the grid and the number of creatures. The current grid has 160×160 squares, and is inhabited by 200 roving creatures.

I also changed it so that the creatures don’t ever leave the space. The way I do this is to detect when a creature hits one of the walls. When that happens, the creature now bounces off that wall, so that it will remain in play.

You can see the result here. As usual, you can click on the word at the very bottom of the page to open up and play with the source code.

Around four hundred years ago, when people first saw the magic lantern, I’ll bet they thought “Wow, we are now in modern times!” That’s probably been the way it has felt with every new kind of communication technology.

When the first telegraph messages made their way across the Atlantic, the first silent movies, the first broadcast TV show. And in more recent times, UseNet, then surfing the Web for the very first time with Mosaic, then eventually all the things you can do on your iPhone.

At each step the feeling has been “Wow, we are now in modern times!” And yet that is exactly the feeling we try to avoid in research.

Our job is to constantly remind ourselves that we are not, in fact, the ne plus ultra of modernity. Instead, we need to think about what might be coming next, and how we can help to make that happen.

Ultimately, I think that’s a more exciting way to think about things. Instead of saying “Wow, we have movies now!” it’s more useful to say “We are in the age of silent movies, and talkies are coming.”

On August 1, 1834, Britain abolished slavery. That historic event occurred 31 years before the United States managed to do the same — a very large gap in my estimation.

As an American, I wanted to find something positive that happened within our own country on this day in history. So I went to the Wikipedia and started looking.

The best thing I could come up with was this: On August 1, 1981, MTV was launched. Its historic first video was “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles.

I’m not sure what this says about our nation.

I noticed that a recent solution word in the NY Times Spelling Bee was “goby”. I had never heard of a goby, but I ended up getting it right anyway, because there are only so many possible four letter words that start with “go”.

After I finished the puzzle, I looked up the word, and it turns out that it’s a species of fish. Which wouldn’t be all that notable except that today it happened again.

In today’s Spelling Bee, one of the solution words was “dace”. Again, I got it only because there are just so many possible four letter words that start with the letters “da”.

Turns out, a dace is also a species of fish. Which got me wondering: How many four letter words are used in the description of a species of fish?

Just to satisfy my curiosity, I used a combination of Web search and letter-based pattern matching, and here is what I found:

Bass
Carp
Chub
Dace
Drum
Goby
Pike
Shad
Tuna

I know that solving this little puzzle is not going to change the world. But it makes me happy.

Saw Elton John in concert, and he was absolutely glorious. He happily focused on singing the songs that the audience wanted to hear, and his voice sounded much better at 75 than most voices will ever sound at any age.

His extended rendition of Rocket Man, in particular, was transcendent. But hearing it live reawakened a mystery that has lived in my soul ever since I first heard it half a century ago.

The mystery is this: If what he is doing up there is, as he says, “just a job, five days a week,” then what is he doing on the other two days?

Does this mean that when you’re stuck up there on Mars all by yourself, you get weekends off? And if you do get weekends off, what do you do when you’re not working?

I know there are greater mysteries than this. But I have lived with this one for a long time, and so far nobody has ever explained it to me.

Maybe Bernie Taupin knows the answer.

I was dining yesterday at a very good vegan restaurant, when I overheard something unexpected. Someone was had just arrived to join a large party a few tables over.

Just before he sat down, he said loudly to the waiter “Can I get a cheeseburger?” It was clearly an attempt at cheeky humor.

The waiter didn’t miss a beat. “Yes, we have that,” he replied pleasantly, and accurately (their burger is plant based, and quite good).

But the other people at that table looked uncomfortable. There was an awkward silence.

In my head, I started trying to unpack what had just happened. What exactly was going on here?

Clearly the guy was trying to be funny. But none of the people he knew at that table seemed to think it was funny.

Maybe he felt awkward about the choice of a vegan restaurant. But in that case, what he said was clearly a dig at whoever had chosen that restaurant.

Maybe it was a little more complex. Perhaps the man resented the choice of restaurant but was not consciously aware of his own resentment — until his joke misfired.

I found myself thinking about the “house rules” that kick in when we enter someone else’s space. Some rules are explicit, and others are implicit.

An implicit rule in a kosher restaurant would be not to jokingly order a ham and cheese sandwich. An explicit rule would be not to jokingly shout “Fire”.

The same thing goes for other shared spaces. Implicitly you shouldn’t cough too much during a play. Explicitly you shouldn’t start shouting curses at the actors on stage.

It’s a sliding scale. My guess is that the guy in the restaurant miscalculated, and broke an implicit rule of the house without quite intending to. At least not consciously.

A great way to realize how many words there are that you don’t know is to do the NY Times Spelling Bee. Some days I manage to get all the words, and other days I don’t.

Today I got them all, but for a while it was touch and go. One word in particular continued to elude me.

At some point I gave up on trying words I knew, and started to look for words I had never heard of. In particular, I tried the word “chancel”.

See, I had heard of the word,”chancellor”, and I figured that might be a related word. And that did the trick.

But the thing is, I still had no idea what this word meant. I had never even heard of it.

So I looked it up. Turns out it’s a very cool word. You could look it up too. 🙂

Continuing with the theme of “start with a grid and then do something,” I decided to create something mysterious.

I start with the graph paper, and then set each square of the graph paper to a different color. So of course I end up with a low resolution image.

Turning a vice into a virtue, I created an out of focus scene. I was aiming to create the impression that something is going on, without quite making it clear what it is. And an easy way to do that kind of thing is to use my noise function.

You can see the result here.

If you scroll down to the bottom, you can click on the word there to see and edit the code that makes the magic happen. Feel free to play with it!

In conclusion, the proposed constitutional amendment treats a serious issue as a political football. By doing so, it shows no respect for families, women, children, or potential babies.

Any legislation that took this issue seriously would address the responsibility of government under the amended Constitution. It would discuss government funding to provide counseling, health care services — both pre-natal and post-natal — and mechanisms to enforce appropriate penalties for violent rapes that will now result in pregnancy, including pregnancy of children.

For example, serious legislation would need to ask, as a fundamental question, “What price should a rapist pay to society for an act of violence that will now lead to children bearing children?” That person’s criminal act will, after any such amendment, result in a huge financial burden on everyone.

In addition to any other charges, shouldn’t the criminal be declared, under the amended Constitution, financially responsible for all of those costs? And if he can’t pay those costs, shouldn’t he be forced to pay his debt to society in other ways?

I agree that there is a reasonable conversation to be had around regulating abortion, just as we now regulate handguns, automobiles, medical prescriptions and many other situations in which human lives are at risk.

But this is not that legislation. This seems like a bunch of old men in Topeka acting like scared little boys, lacking the decency and courage to treat a serious issue with the seriousness that it deserves.

The way this sham “amendment” is worded, nobody in Kansas is being treated with any respect or compassion. Except maybe rapists.