Merry piranhamoose

Merry Christmas, says the piranahmoose! Joy, absurdism, holiday lights, a delightful hat, and rows of sharp teeth that can rend flesh from bone in seconds! --- all in a holiday spirit.


This post's theme word is weasand, "esophagus." There's a weasel stuck in the weasand of that piranhamoose.

Merry Christmas (Eve)!

I hope your holiday season is free of unspeakable horrors... but just in case it isn't, here's my favorite holiday poem, as written/narrated/produced by Norm Sherman of the fantastic Drabblecast.


This post's theme word is batrachian, "relating to frogs." Bloated, batrachian, and covered in red! A close second was lambent, "glowing."

The Doctor did it! He saved us!

I guess that all the media hype about an apocalypse has --- unbelievably, yet again --- come to naught. Either that, or the Doctor saved us yet again.

Back to taking our continually-saved-from-the-brink-of-annihilation lives for granted!


This post's theme word is myoclonic. That moment when you're nearly asleep and jerk awake is called a myoclonic jerk. I thought the End Times had come, but it was merely a myoclonic jerk... and what a jerk!

A very nice teaching compliment

After sitting a 3-hour final exam, one of my students (from a giant class of more than 180) came up to me, introduced himself, and said,

What are you teaching next semester? ... and can I take it?

I've been receiving lots of positive feedback on my teaching recently. This is the cherry on the compliment cake!


This post's theme word is asphodel, "an immortal flower said to grow in the Elysian fields." Your compliment is better than any asphodel!

Candidates and tenured professors

Some topical humor about recent comments made by professors as well as presidential candidates (1, 2, 3), via PhD comics.

When I first read this it took me a full minute to figure out what part was supposed to be funny; at first it just struck me as pessimistic and accurate. You know you've been in academia too long when...



This post's theme word is starets, "a religious teacher or advisor." I want you to regard me not only as your supervisor, but as the sole starets of your life.

Looper

One postdoc deadline is past and so I took a break and got around to watching Looper.

I thought it was nice. The recursive nature of time-travel was neatly introduced and explored (including a nod to nerds: "I don't want to talk about time travel because if we start talking about it then we're going to be here all day talking about it, making diagrams"). There was enough action to draw a wide audience and the concomitant funding to make a good movie. Pierce Gagnon gave a great performance as a creepily verbose and thoughtful child.

Looper was pleasant and exciting, and mildly thoughtful. But it certainly wasn't second only to 2001: A Space Odyssey! It was decent.

It had some problems. There were the usual plot issues, e.g., if I were an evil mastermind and wanted to send all minions back in time to be killed by their younger selves, I would not stagger the murders. Because some young minion will catch on, and then not kill himself, and then we have all these time-travel paradoxes plus some very angry guy from the future who's had 30 years to plan his revenge. The entire notion of telekinesis was an unnecessary, shiny dongle added for the special effects sequences. The movie seemed to have many clever bits that were edited out for the final cut -- we kept expecting certain people to be revealed as each other's older selves, and this never happened. Certain paradoxes were ignored. (More rants on plot problems available here.)  Memory was sometimes a push informational channel and other times a pull, as convenient to the level of tension.

Also, you would have thought that by now, all movie villains everywhere at every point in history know one thing: do not mess with Bruce Willis. Just leave the man alone. Because almost every movie I've seen him in --- including this one --- has one scene where Bruce Willis brutally destroys all the baddies, and their hideout, and their technology, and their MacGuffins.

But Looper's main failing in my mind was that it answered all the questions it raised. (Except the gaping plot holes.) The audience had nothing left to ponder as we left the theater: no "why did that happen?" or "how did X cause Y?" These are the interesting questions about stories with loops of time travel! Looper tied up all the loose ends into --- forgive me --- loops, leaving us no dangling threads to play with. (Except the gaping plot holes, which we mercilessly lampooned on the way home.)

If you want a looping time travel movie, watch Primer instead. Then watch it a few more times while you theorize and test your theories. It's much more interesting and difficult to figure out and fun, which is quite revealing about my movie preferences.

xkcd's take on Primer

If you'd prefer a looping, causality-warping book, I highly recommend Charles Yu's How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which has oodles of clever time-travel ideas in it, plus some play with meta-fictional content, plus is a book.


This post's theme word is aceldama, "a place of bloodshed." The aceldama's creation invalidated the causal chain which led to its creation. Spoiler alert.

Sequential timestamping

If you write your date in the American order (month-day-year) then today is momentous for its sequentiality: 10-11-12 (and even more momentous at 1:14pm!).

Today is otherwise rather unremarkable. I have lost my voice, swamped under work and viral bodies. The one pervades my mind; the other, my body. I am attempting to write a description of my research which simultaneously renders it accessible to the reader and emphasizes its broad applications and stresses its difficulty and level of mathematical abstraction.

Days like this make me wonder if I could support myself writing bodice-rippers. Well, it's a fall-back plan, way down the list.


This post's theme word is cerumen, "earwax." Is that cerumen, or are my ears congested?

I'm going to type every word I know! Rectangle...

Today's just another autumn day, as I sit in my grey cinderblock cell and haplessly toil over my keyboard, struggling to produce knowledge.

One of these days, that monkey will produce an article definitively proving P=NP. And won't we all feel foolish.


This post's theme word is callipygous, "having well-shaped buttocks." His callipygous beauty was hidden at his desk job by the overwhelmingly monotonous furniture.

Pesky, provoking pangolin

 I recently upgraded a computer to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS: precise pangolin. The update process was smooth and simple, but the finished install had a number of failings. I proceed to gripe:

The install attempted to migrate my previous settings. It failed. It reset a number of my customized keyboard commands, which was annoying to notice but easy to fix. I'm still not sure I caught them all -- I'll just find out when I try to use some command and it fails. Also, the update managed to copy over my user account and files, but also created a new guest account with no password. What a terrible choice! For security, and privacy! This makes me suspect that I need to closely examine every update for giant security holes so large that the developers look right through and past them. This, too, was easy to fix.

The difficult-to-fix things are all features of the new Unity interface. The Ubuntu online-social-networking suite of programs autostarts on boot up, and has a big envelope-shaped indicator permanently on the top bar. The main menu has been replaced with something called "dash" which is a search -- no more browsing installed applications! -- and prominently includes programs found online which you haven't installed yet. The "launcher" -- formerly the task bar -- features non-differentiable icons of both shortcuts and currently-open programs, and also includes some icons which cannot be removed without recompiling or switching to an experimental build. The alt-tab menu inexplicably always contains the option "desktop."

In an attempt to be more user-friendly, there's no easy way to edit these settings. I've spent two evenings now trawling message boards and developer forums. I installed a configuration tool that came with a ridiculous number of warnings about borking the entire system. I managed to remove the social-online-networking stuff by forcibly uninstalling the entire suite of programs. I fixed the alt-tab menu by rolling back the entire alt-tab--bound keyboard system to a previous, and now tenuously supported, package. I can't find a trustworthy way of fixing the remaining things, so I've established workarounds whereby these features are auto-hidden and not used by default.

Bleh.


I've fiddled with it to be Lila-usable, but (1) it took awhile, and (2) it provoked me. Why would a pangolin do such a thing? All I want is to alt-tab reasonably between open windows!

Ultimately, I don't like Unity because it seems anti-unix. It discourages learning about your own computer by making settings hidden and unchangeable. The "search-only" menu is especially bad, repressing exploration.


This post's theme word is noisome, "offensive (esp. to smell), harmful, noxious." This experience has soured me on the pangolin; although I've never seen one, I consider it among the most noisome creatures imaginable.


[Update 9/12/2012: Found more broken keyboard shortcuts. Also, hibernate is disabled to the point of being not even an option by default? ... because some users have problems with it? Boo. Fixed and fixed.]

Academic summer's end

One week remains before the fall semester begins, and as usual, PhD comics hits the sentiment exactly:

This post's theme word is proskynesis, "the traditional Persian act of prostrating oneself before a person of higher social rank." Modern academia has formalized proskynesis; we call it "dissertation defense."