Scrabulous is Doomed!

No, I don’t actually have any inside news on the legal troubles the creators are facing, but Scrabulous is currently my favorite game… and therefore it is doomed. If you are my favorite anything, watch out because chances are you are being hunted down by Anton Chigurh.

Let’s examine the evidence:

• Favorite TV Show: The Wire. Now down to the final two episodes of its five glorious seasons, after having unceremoniously taken out my favorite character (have I mentioned that this is the greatest TV show of all time?)

• Favorite Music Website: NPR’s Discover Songs. After being instrumental in launching my personal music renaissance of the past year… my company blocked their music streams on Valentines Day. Thanks for that. I am of course retaliating by streaming far more music off of KEXPlorer.com… but it’s just not the same.
  
  
• Favorite Bar: Dr. Dremos. While we did manage to hang on to a piece of it, the search continues for a hang out to rival Dremo's. Nothing comes close to its combination of, convenience, crowds without being crowded, the cross-section of citizenry, readily available parlor games, and uncanny knack for creating memories...

• Favorite Blog: Seeking John Galt. After just over a year of wonderfully witty and insightful posts, my favorite blogger has gone to ground (and even taken many of my favorite posts with her, including one in which I am proud to have played a supporting role—resurrected by the magic of Google Cache). I’m convinced she has signed a major publishing deal and her contract precludes her from blogging any longer, but I will miss reading her work nonetheless.

I suppose all of the time freed up by the demise of some of my favorite pastimes means I’ll have that much more time to dedicate to Scrabulous… at least until it too inevitably falls prey to my curse.

And a random grab-bag of Notes to Jon (beware the lecture notes):

• How ever I rank the animated and live action shorts next year, be sure to bet on my fourth ranked pick in your Oscar pool (my 4^th —of 5—picks won each category). Had I nailed those two categories I’d have come home the winner… despite going with my heart and taking Juno for Best Picture.

• From the 9^th annual Roger Revelle Lecture by Dr. Freilich:

• Satellites beat boats for collecting ocean data

• Warmer ocean surfaces lead to less efficient upwelling of the nutrient-rich water below and that results in lower “Net Primary Productivity”… which I think meant less photosynthesizing critters absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Hmmm. The warmer it gets the less CO2 the oceans will absorb… and the less CO2 the oceans absorb the warmer it will get. That sounds like a bad thing.

• Satellites thousands of kilometers above the ocean can now calculate surface wind speed and direction by measuring the thumbnail-sized ripples on the water caused by local surface wind.

• The white-chocolate-with-Heath-bar-chunk desserts were amazing

• And from Rocky Kolb's Dark Matter lecture at the Carnegie Institution:

• Dark Matter and Dark Energy make up 95% of the mass of the universe

• One of his better jokes in response to the big-bang-is-just-a-theory folks (who are often related to the evolution-is-just-a-theory folks) who insist we consider all possibilities… is that “gravity is just a theory too. So the next time you come to the edge of a cliff… by all means, consider all possibilities”.

• In the battle for which form scientists believe all this Dark Matter is stored in (between MACHOs and WIMPs), WIMPs are winning and the race is on to discover them (just like the Higgs-Bosun particle)… however, due to federal science funding cuts it’ll likely be some Frenchman who discovers them.

• “The Unbearable Lightness of Nothing”. Even if you create a vacuum and cool it to absolute zero, the Quantum Uncertainty Principle says that at any time a particle and its anti-particle can appear, exist for a brief moment, and then annihilate. “Nothing” is hard to come by.

• Finally, I discovered that the $10 ticket deal to shows by The Shakespeare Threatre Company really just requires a phone call at 10am on a Tuesday (I assumed you’d really have to go in person to have a decent shot at one of the 20 pairs of tickets). We got our choice of several nights and Darren and I, purchasing separately, ended up with 4 adjacent seats. (See how cleverly I buried this nugget under all of those lecture notes)

Almost Heavenly

My triple-header Thursday night (lecture, climbing, and party-at-the-soon-departed Dr. Dremo's) kicked off with a lecture entitled "How I killed Pluto, and why it had it coming" by Michael Brown. Actually Michael's team discovered Eris, a (now-classified-as-dwarf) planet that was bigger than Pluto and touched off the whole reclassification brouhaha (as he put it, "Pluto was just collateral damage"). This was my second favorite lecture in the Carnegie Institution for Science's (free) Capital Science Lecture series (the first was last year's lecture by Steven Squyres on the Mars Rovers). Thanks to the wonders of the interweb, those of you who missed the lecture due to the snow or other asundry* excuses—which is all of you, since I went alone—can now watch it in their archives (along with the lecture by Michael Gazzaniga that I wrote about in October—but sadly not last year's Mars Rover lecture)

*Need to have a sidebar about whether asundry is a word or not. The dictionary says it isn't, but a remarkable number of people, myself included, (mis?)use the phrase "various and asundry". Many people use the apparently correct "various and sundry", but I want to know why I, and so many others, have it wrong...

I'm sure one reason I especially enjoyed the lecture is because Pluto's deplanetification is somewhat near and dear to me. Some of you may remember my psychic trivia ability, but for those who don't, "I'll digress very quickly because that's what I do best... except for the quickly part" (one of Michael's jokes that I enjoyed and felt was a good one for me). At a Fado's Pub Quiz in late 2004 the question was asked "What is the smallest planet?". Now what kind of question is that? In 2004 everyone knew Pluto was the smallest planet (In the world I choose to believe in at least). So... this must be a trick question, thought I. I then preceded to spend the next 20 minutes convincing my team that Mercury was the smallest planet because a) if the answer was Pluto it wouldn't be a trivia question and b) I vaguely remembered an article in the 90s about how Pluto wasn't technically considered a Planet anymore. My team went along with me and we lost those points. But as we all know now, I was not wrong... I was prescient. Incidentally, the next month, when I spent 20 minutes arguing (correctly, this time) that Titan was a moon of Saturn and not Jupiter (based on the Cassini-Huygens probe article I'd read that day!) my team wouldn't believe me based on my Plutonic reputation and we lost points again.

Here are some notes from the lecture:

• If the trivia question, "What is the ninth largest celestial body orbiting the Sun?" ever comes up, answer Eris (pending future discoveries... which Michael predicts, actually).

• If you are photographing the stars to find new bodies... be sure to take a second picture of the same sky later on.
  

• Eris is named after the Greek Goddess of Discord and Strife (because of the astronomical debate that ensued?)
  

• Michael had the most to gain from Pluto staying a planet (along with Eris), he'd have been the only living person to discover a planet... and even he thinks the right decision was made. His argument was that if you take away one of the current 8 planets the whole solar system feels the impact and if you take away anything else then no one notices (although he thinks the "planet" classification is basically aesthetic, and the right classification is something like "big things - Jupiter thru Neptune", "medium things - Mercury thru Mars", "small things between Mars and Jupiter" and "small things beyond Neptune")

• Many more that I may post later but won't bore you with now (after all if you are intrigued you should probably go watch the whole lecture online).

And in other "Heavenly" news, I kicked off the 2008 ski season with a trip back to one of the runs I grew up skiing on at Liberty Mountain. Enjoy the slideshow and notes below:

• MLK Weekend is a great weekend to ski locally (Liberty or Whitetail). Two years running there have been virtually no lines, presumably because everyone goes long on that weekend (the 22° high might have contributed as well)
  
  
• "The South Pole" was open at the base of the back side and served burgers, hot dogs and chicken sandwiches along with chips and hot chocolate, which seemed to satisfy the group and saved us a trip back to the front of the mountain

• I liked the 160cm parabolic skis I rented, but didn't get to try them on moguls and I think the edges might have been a problem on ice

• Camera batteries die almost instantly in cold weather... but will work again for a few more shots each time the camera is warmed up
  

• For Apres Ski at McKee's Tavern, order the French Onion Soup (if you can handle soup for $8.50) and stay away from the Crab and Artichoke Dip!

Busy? Who, me?

It’s been a busy 24 hours. I’ve experienced 30 plays, one lecture, and two of D.C.s finest quick-eat establishments—Julia’s Empanadas and The Amsterdam Falafelshop. It certainly helps that 29 of the plays were performed in just over an hour as part of the umbrella work Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, which is the longest title of a piece I remember seeing: so long in fact that on the ticket it merely lists it as the initials (or acronym, if you can figure out how to pronounce it) TMLMTBGB.

My audience-member marathon began with Journeymen Theater’s preview of Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s Life’s a Dream. While arriving at Golden Hour (6:30 pm) is helpful for parking it isn’t necessary for getting a preview ticket to the show (unlike my previous experience with a Pay What You Can at Woolly Mammoth Threatre when a 6:30 arrival meant a line around the corner and no shot at a ticket). While I don’t intend to review the show, Darren and I did feel it was worth our time and money. Some memories from the show include,

• experiencing a play from the 1600s translated into English, which I assume gives a rough idea of what it must be like for a foreigner to watch Shakespeare translated into their native language (able to focus on the plot rather than deciphering the lines),
• actor Rex Daugherty providing the comic highlight of the show when he makes the best of his imprisonment by turning his manacles into musical instruments,
• and Darren eventually realizing that the two main actors were in the previous play he saw: Ambition Facing West (which may lead to the creation of our own personal IMDB—okay, a spreadsheet—of DC theatre).

The marathon continued today with Peter Mumby’s lecture on Thresholds and the Resilience of Coral Reefs . While perhaps not as juicy as his lecture a couple days earlier on Parrotfish sex, this one certainly captivated the audience of scientists, and was even presented clearly enough for me to follow along (though I wish someone would write a wiki on “coral recruitment” so I knew exactly what that meant). To sum up my understanding of the lecture, there are two stable equalibria for a reef ecosystem: coral dominant or algae dominant. A reef will approach one of these states depending on which side of a threshold curve it falls on. A reef’s location relative to the curve is determined by the existing percentage of coral coverage on one axis and the percentage of the reef that can be grazed by local fauna (primarily Parrotfish in the Caribbean) in a six month period on the other axis. The resilience of a reef is defined as the probability that it will stay on the coral dominant side of the threshold. Because of the threshold nature of the system, a small change for a reef that is right near the threshold will have far greater consequences than a larger change for a reef that isn't near the threshold. The important thing to consider when managing a marine ecosystem or determining the cost effectiveness of management options is to prevent the reef from crossing the threshold towards the algae dominant stable state. Trust me, his presentation was much more compelling—at least to the ladies, probably because of his accent. But hey, this is called Note to Jon after all and I want to remember the lecture…

But the highlight of this endurance event was definitely the 29 plays of TMLMTBGB (we ran out of time to see the 30^th play, which in this case would have been #26 My Family in 2D). We were led to our seats by Greg Allen, who AB mistook as an usher, but who actually is the Founding Director of the Neo-Futurists (oops), which have been performing variations of this show in their home town of Chicago since 1988. The show was then introduced by a handsome, articulate man (the description he asked us to use, as best I can remember) who encouraged the audience to go right home after the performance and tell everyone to get on the internet and purchase tickets to the show before it ends this weekend since tickets are going fast and every performance deserves to be sold out… and since I agree with that assessment I am doing just that. Without spoiling any of the 29 plays (which the audience request by numbers that literally hang above the stage, and which must be performed before the 60 minute timer runs out, or you just don’t get to see them all!), if these are on your menu, don’t let them be the one(s) hanging from the clothesline when the buzzer sounds:

• Mr. Science Demonstrates Othello, which wins for best use of props,

• The Dobler Effect, which involves about the most intimate audience participation you can get away with legally,

• Pastie On My Dick, which shouldn’t require much imagination,

• Low Stakes/High Drama, which is exactly that,

• Veterans Day: July 4^th Edition, which is a poignant change of pace,

• The Lamb May Lie Down With the Lion (But She Doesn’t Get A Lot Of Sleep), which I really hope isn’t autobiographical,

• and, my personal favorite, Moonlit Threatre Presents: The Apollo 11 Lunar Landing, which will ensure that you never think about a moon landing the same way again.

AB is the proud owner of the numbered sheet for the concise play, Republican Compassion in Action, and through my die roll on the stage at the end of the show I am responsible for ensuring that 3 plays will be swapped out on the January 11^th performance (it’d have been 6 plays if I remembered to let AB blow on the die). So go check it out and if you find out what The Chair is or you get to see My Family in 2D, let me know…

Did I choose to write this?

This was the original intent of my blog, to document things I learned at lectures but tended to forget almost immediately. Hence, Note To Jon.

Tonight was the first opportunity I had to attend this years Capital Science Lectures at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Michael Gazzaniga of UCSB presented a lecture on neuroscience called Brains, Minds, and Social Process. It actually turned out to be about a new Law and Neuroscience project Dr. Gazzaniga is co-Directing (Sandra Day O'Connor is the Honorary Chair - no Darren, not Sarah Connor).

He touched on the idea that the brain makes a decision before we are even conscious of the decision and the implications that this has for free will and by extension the idea of legal responsibility. He addressed how neuroscience would be related to persistent vegetative states like Terry Schiavo's, or to the concept of bias such as the Duke lacrosse case. But my goal isn't really to attempt to recap the lectures just record a few of the memorable highlights.

One quote I liked: "Man may think he is great, but to a mosquito we are just something to eat."

He had done a lot of work with people whose connection between the two hemispheres of their brain had been severed. He described a split-brain experiment that was performed. They show people two images and have them focus in between them. In all brains everything on the left of the focal point is processed by the right hemisphere and vice versa. In split-brain patients the left hemisphere would literally have no knowledge of what the left eye saw. The experiment would show a chicken foot on the right and a snowy driveway on the left. The patient then had to point to one of 4 images which was most closely related to the object in front of them. There was a chicken in front of the chicken foot and a shovel in front of the snowy driveway. When asked to point the split-brain patient could correctly point to the shovel and chicken with the corresponding hand (left eye sees snowy driveway, right hemisphere processes and sends signal to left hand to point to shovel). What gets interesting is when the patient is asked why they picked a chicken and a shovel. Only the left hemisphere processes speech, and the left hemisphere has no knowledge of the snowy driveway, but it still serves as an interpreter and tries to come up with the most plausible excuse that it can. So verbally the split-brain patient would explain "The chicken foot is associated with the chicken and the shovel is needed to clean the shit out of the chicken coop".

You can measure the brain response of a patient experiencing various emotions, "Pride", "Envy", "Pity" will have a unique brain signature in a given person. What is interesting (and disturbing) is that if the patient is shown an image with someone in an extreme outgroup (e.g. a drug addict) these emotions aren't registered at all. The brain shows no response, as if the person in the outgroup isn't even human.

Another interesting philosophical experiment that was posed was the trolley problem. The wiki explains it better than I will, but here were my notes:
You are a passenger on a trolley that is out of control and hurtling down a track towards five people tied to the track by a mad philosopher (that was from the wiki, but I loved the phrase so I am borrowing it). There is a flip you can switch to divert the train off to a side track that has one person tied to it. Should you flip the switch? 89% say it is morally right to flip the switch.

The second scenario is that you are on a footbridge above the trolley track and see it coming toward the five people tied to the track. You realize you can stop the train if you drop a very heavy object on the track. Conveniently a very fat man happens to be standing next to you and is the only thing heavy enough to stop the train (you yourself are not fat enough to jump down and stop the train). Should you push him off to save the 5? 11% say it is morally right to push the fat man.

So what's the difference? Do we have a special place in our hearts for fat men? To me, I suppose it is because you are actively killing the fat man and in the first case you are simply flipping a switch (which will likely lead to someone's death, but that was the mad philosophers doing, and who knows maybe the person on that track will somehow get untied in time - hey I'm an optimist).

Our prison population consists of 20-30% psychopaths and 65-85% people with Antisocial Personality Disorders.

Dr. Gazzaniga believe courtrooms will be shifting over from having psychiatrists and psychologists testifying about what they "think" to having neuroscientists testifying about what they "know".

Anybody still reading this :-p

Photo 101

Took the Photo 101 "class" with Scott and Laura tonight (they even had a syllabus and illustrations). Scott gave a good overview of common features of digital cameras, and I had a chance to spend time finding them on my Canon Powershot SD630 Digital Elph (which took a self portrait of himself there on the left). Then Laura went over some of the basic principles of photography and composition as shown in the lovely illustrations below. A couple of tips that I picked up:

-You can cover the flash of your camera with a piece of paper (like a receipt from your pocket) to get a diffuse flash (using a finger will give everything a red tone and a dollar bill will make things green).

-Instead of using a digital zoom it is usually better to just crop the picture after it is uploaded, the one exception could be when the subject is in much different lighting conditions than its surroundings and the camera can't auto focus or auto meter without being digitally zoomed.

-Red eye tends to be worse the closer the flash is to the lens (or when your subject is drunk, because their eye responds to light more slowly)

-You can take a picture into the sun if your subject's head blocks the sun and it will make them look like they have an aura (otherwise there really isn't a trick to being able to take a picture of someone in front of a particular backdrop when the sun is also low in the sky behind them).

-I only get about two hours of use out of my camera when I am tinkering with it as I was for this class

Air Jumpshot Prayer

This morning I had the opportunity to visit the ADAMS Mosque in Sterling with the Middle East Engagement Forum. We got a tour of the Mosque which is styled as a community center rather than in the traditional Mosque architecture, to the point where the main prayer room is a basketball court except when carpets are rolled out for Friday prayer. Both men and women pray in the same room and the mosque serves Sunni and Shia Muslims. There is a motorized partition in the room which was originally intended as a divider between the men and womens' side of the room during prayer but the women rejected this. Cubicle partitions were next suggested but this was also rejected by the women. Finally it was agreed that the partitions would be short wooden fence sections with lattice work (exactly the same lattice that is on our deck).

The Imam of the Mosque, Mohamed Magid, took the time to meet with us for nearly two hours to answer our questions about Islam. A great deal was covered but some of the more interesting points were the high level contacts between the Imam and senior government officials. He discussed having meetings with the President, Secretary of State Powell and Rice, and the FBI Director among others in the years since September 11th. This raised another point which was the wide variety of roles that an Imam such as Imam Magid plays. In addition to the traditional role of leading prayers, he is also the main PR and media contact for the Mosque, provides counseling services, matrimonial services, attends conferences and works on interfaith initiatives.

A couple of points that Imam Magid stressed were the need for interfaith initiatives and to always talk to those who hate you, not just those who love you. He stated that any reform or reinterpretation of Islam needed to come from within and couldn't be prodded from outside by the West. He was frustrated with the media for emphasizing the sectarian terminology in their reports (e.g. "Sunni insurgents" and "Shia Militia"). He did raise the identical point to one raised by Thomas Friedman at an earlier lecture which was: Where was the outrage in the Muslim world against the beheading of a hostage in the name of Islam? He pointed out that this was a much greater affront to Islam than the Danish cartoons which were demonstrated against vehemently.

After the discussion with the Imam we had the opportunity to witness the afternoon prayer (zuhr). I sat to the side of the men's prayer area and was able to watch the prayer. Azim, the Muslim in our group explained how the prayers work. The zuhr prayer is a silent prayer except for the call to change positions (between standing, bowed head, kneeling and fully prostrate). At the zuhr prayer the prostrations are done 4 times. The number of the times prayers are done is apparently extremely important and even when you do non-obligitory prayers before or after the actual call to prayer they must be done in specific numbers.

During the zuhr, each person is mentally reciting their own selection of a section of the Qur'an. Speaking God's words to God. They must have memorized their prayer and that and only that is what they should be praying. It is not an informal silent prayer like I am used to which I found interesting. What was informal however was the dress people were wearing (a majority were in there shorts and tanktops that they had been playing basketball in and several had ball caps on) and the number of people who came late and joined partway through or even almost at the end of the prayer. The most memorable moment of the day for me came as a young boy who had been downstairs playing basketball came into the room and walked to join the prayer line. Partway across the floor, he paused, spun around, and pretended to make a jump shot into the air before spinning back around, stepping into place and beginning the solemn prostrations. This informality was juxtaposed again though by the fact that once the prayer was done, each person who had come in late continued through the prayer from the beginning to the point where they came in even as the rest of the congregation (if that word applies) left. It was critical that the latecomers had to complete the full 4 prostrations.

"Most Redundant Post Ever"

A few months back someone posted on Slashdot that a previous statement was "the most redundant sentence ever". The next post correctly corrected them and pointed to the Buffalo article on Wikipedia. Clearly the original post wasn't as redundant as the grammatically correct sentence Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Or perhaps a bit more understandably Buffalo bison [that] Buffalo bison bully bully Buffalo bison. Apparently this example will show up in a book I just borrowed to read, Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. In hindsight the sentence may not have been redundant at all, but rather just repetitive.

Gargoyle Tour at the National Cathedral

A couple of weeks ago I took the Gargoyle Tour at the National Cathedral with MeetInDC and realized I'd learned some fun facts which I realized I had little chance of remembering. Since that became the impetus for starting this blog I figured it should be the first real post.

Here are some of the things I learned (as best I can remember - this is the internet, so it could be wrong. I am only infallible in person... usually):
- The National Cathedral is an Episcopalian Cathedral

- Gargoyles are a subset of "Grotesques", which is the more general name for decorative sculpture used to direct water away from a Cathedral to preserve the rock. Gargoyles typically have a hole bored through the rock through which the water is funnelled (gargoyles sometimes would have a channel on the top if it wasn't possible drill a hole through the rock). Then half of the block would be carved and the other half would be embedded directly as the wall of the Cathedral.



- Non-gargoyle grotesques (which don't have to be hideous at all - some grotesques are in the form of angels) often came in pairs at the base of "Gablets" (essentially small gables in the Cathedral structure)















Here are some of the more memorable grotesques we saw on the tour:

In Memoriam:

These two bare blocks are the only undecorated grotesques on the Cathedral. They are a memorial to the only stone carver who fell from scaffolding and died while working on the Cathedral. These blocks on the Gablet were to be his next project. None of the other workers knew what he had planned for them and asked to leave them blank in his memory.





The Boss:

This is a Gargoyle depicting one of the stone carvers bosses (apparently with the bosses' blessing - although he hadn't seen the design). The boss has a cloven hoof coming out of one shoe and a devil's tail. We were informed the boss took the joke rather well and the slide show on the tour had a photo of the boss with his gargoyle.





The Grandsons:

These boys' grandparents donated the money for these gargoyles. The grandson on the right is the good grandson with a halo and schoolbooks (or it could be a writing slate) while the bad grandson is on the left with a broken halo and his hand in the cookie jar. Apparently the grandparents never told the grandsons which was which.





The Whistling Mason:

We were informed that one of the stone carvers had a habit of whistling at the girls from the Cathedral's school. Somehow rather than a pink slip, he got a grotesque in his honor... in full whistling repose.













Clubs and cubs:

The left gargoyle consists of two hands gripping the pipe like a golf club. The right gargoyle is a bear looking through the St. Louis Arch.







DARTH: Yes there is indeed a grotesque of Darth Vader on the National Cathedral (high up one of the towers as seen from the north side). It was apparently the winning idea of student who entered a competition in the 80s for a new design.

Not Shown:

A couple of the more memorable ones that I couldn't get pictures of include a hippie sitting on a bag of marijuana, and a couple of robotic stone cameras that are supposedly pointed at the Russian Embassy.