Intro (also, a little more technical issues)

I suppose I should talk a little bit about what Kongregate is. At its base, it's just a place where people can upload Flash games and other people can play them, which is not too different from many other sites such as Newgrounds. There are a couple of features which differentiate it, however. First is that it's very oriented toward building a community (hence the name, I guess), so, for instance, every time you're playing a game, there's also a chat panel to the right where you can carry on enlightened discussions on Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Undestanding with everyone else in the room. I'll leave it to the clever people in the audience to figure out how well this works in practice, so this is a feature that doesn't really do anything for me.

The feature which does do something for me, however, is badges. After all, adding achievements to a terrible game instantly makes it something that you want to play, because you get rewarded with this achievement at the end!

Anyway, as you might expect, Kongregate is no stranger to Sturgeon's Law, but that doesn't mean that there are some good games there. And hopefully I can find some of them!

Oh yeah, the obligatory referral link: Sign up using this link!

OK, the promised technical issues. (Try to contain your excitement!) It looks like Blogger can't import comments from external sources, so the old comments will not appear (I still have them saved on bantha, however). I suppose I could go in and add them by hand to old posts, but that is not terribly exciting, to say the least, so I think I'll pass.

One item of curiosity: the old blog, even when lying completely dormant for years on end, never seemed to get any comment spam, which pleasantly surprised me. I guessed that my comment system was so old and janky that the spam scripts didn't know how to handle it. Well, it turns out that I was half right. So, my old comment script saves the comments in a file with a name of ###.comment, where ### is the ID number of the post being commented in. When I was cleaning out the comment directory, I found that there was, in fact, an extremely large file called .comment. Apparently the spam scripts would just submit their comment without any post number attached at all, and the comment script (apparently not being so great) would accept this. The spam comments would never show up on the blog, of course, because they weren't actually attached to a post, and a casual ls of the comments directory wouldn't turn them up, either. Anyway, this makes it quite easy to nuke all of the spam.

Paul's Trip Through Kongregate (also, hello there!)

So I was talking with Kenneth yesterday, and he happened to bring up this blog. And we were talking about Kongregate, which I have recently been sucked into. And I had an idea! I have comments about these games that I've been playing, and they're a little too substantial to just put in the comments section. Besides, why would I want to put them in the comments where they could be read by hundreds of people (including maybe even the game authors), when I could put them here and have one or two people read them if I was lucky? So I decided to dust off the blog and put it to that purpose.

Anyway, I'll probably comment on one game per day. I'll only comment on games that I have finished (for some value of "finished"), since that seems like the fairest thing to do, so there may be a bias here towards games that are good and/or short. But I don't think there's anything wrong with that!

As you can also see, I'm trying to modernize the blog a little bit by using one of the current Blogger standard templates. Also, instead of using the old janky custom comments system I had, I've just switched over to the standard Blogger comment system (yes, this blog was created before Blogger had comments available). This has caused the old comments to disappear, naturally, though I still have them around; maybe I'll figure out if I can put them back into old posts properly. For the time being I've just left it at the default of requiring a Google account to post, but if this annoys people I can make it less restrictive. Anyway, there will probably be more changes in the immediate future, but I mainly just want to get things into a condition where I can post with minimal effort and without the result looking horrible.

Oh, yeah, obligatory plug: If this series induces you to sign up for Kongregate, use this link, if you would be so kind.

First review tomorrow!

How to make a particle accelerator
(part two in an occasional series)

The two most important considerations in making a particle accelerator are (1) what particles you want to accelerate, and (2) what shape your accelerator will be. As it turns out, answering one of these questions will answer the other one for you, so let's consider (1) first.

Now, working from first principles, we can specify some limitations on what it's practical to accelerate. We'd like to accelerate stable particles, because it's rather a pain to have particles decaying when you're trying to accelerate them. (Though research on muon colliders is an active field, we're nowhere near actually building one.) Furthermore, we're pretty much limited to charged particles, as charged particles can be steered using magnetic fields and accelerated using electric fields, while neutral particles can't. (Neutrino beams do exist, but these are produced by steering and accelerating charged particles, which then decay to neutrinos.)

So, limiting ourselves to charged, stable particles, we're left with a very short list: protons and antiprotons, and electrons and positrons.

Considering all of the possibilities, colliding electrons with electrons will not produce very interesting results (the conservation laws in effect severely limit the possibilities of what you can get back), and positrons are easy to make anyway. Colliding electrons with protons can be done (and is done at HERA at DESY), but it's more of a specialized case (translation: I don't know that much about it), so I won't talk further about it. This leaves us with three interesting possibilities:

1) Protons and protons
2) Protons and antiprotons
3) Electrons and positrons

Now, our choice of geometry is pretty much determined by our choice of what to collide. If we choose electrons and positrons, a ring is pretty much ruled out, as the loss of energy via synchrotron radiation will prevent us from reaching interesting energies. So choice (3) leaves you with a linear collider. Conversely, if we choose protons, then there's no reason not to choose a ring over a linear collider, as the ring will allow us to reach higher energies (as the particles can be accelerated many times, rather than once).

The next obvious question is: why choose one over the other? Well, let's consider the advantages and disadvantages of each. Generally, for the reasons just mentioned above, a proton collider will allow us to reach higher energies. On the other hand, when a proton and an antiproton (or another proton) collide, only two of the six quarks (or antiquarks) involved actually interact, and they only have part of the total energy (and, worse yet, you don't know exactly how much that part is), while the other four will take some of the energy and do something uninteresting. Conversely, an electron-positron annihilation is much cleaner, conceptually speaking, and the entire energy goes into whatever they produced. So (and this is, of course, a drastic oversimplification, but good enough for my purposes), a proton collider will be better for producing new and interesting things, but a linear collider is better for making precision measurements of things. (Those of you paying attention might notice that my current project is trying to make a precision measurement using data from a proton-antiproton collider. That's part of the reason it's so difficult.)

How about choosing between options (1) and (2)? Well, the practical advantages and disadvantages are pretty straightforward. If you have protons and antiprotons in a ring, then you can use one set of magnets: the same magnetic field will bend protons one way and antiprotons the other way, so you're all set. On the other hand, having protons go in both directions requires two sets of magnets (and two separate tunnels for the separate beams), increasing your cost and complexity. However, the big disadvantage of using antiprotons is that they're hard to make. The efficiency of the antiproton-making process used at the Tevatron is about one one-millionth, so making antiprotons is a very slow process (and if the antiprotons are lost for any reason, as they not infrequently are, you can have hours of dead time while you wait for the antiproton stash to build up again). Ultimately, though, the decision is made on physics grounds: at the energies used at the Tevatron, top quarks are typically made by the interaction of a quark and an antiquark, so having an antiproton around greatly increases the number of top quarks (and other interesting stuff) produced; thus, the Tevatron uses protons and antiprotons. For the energies that will be used at the LHC, however, top quarks are more often made by the interaction of two gluons, and there are plenty of those in ordinary protons. Consequently the LHC can get away with being a proton-proton collider.

All right, now you've decided what you want to collide. Now, you want to make your collider the best damn collider it can be. How can you go about doing that? Well, there are two basic variables that determine how useful your collider is going to be: (1) energy -- the higher energy you have, the more interesting interactions you can produce; and (2) luminosity -- the number of interactions that take place per second. If you want a really good collider, you'll want to maximize both of these, given the constraints.

What are the constraints on energy? Let's consider a linear collider first. Well, a linear collider has a bunch of RF generators (called "klystrons") which pump energy into the electron beam. So, it should be pretty clear that the two ways to get more energy out of a linear collider are to (1) inject more energy in each klystron, and (2) have more klystrons. The latter means a longer linear accelerator, and so there the main constraint is cost (not only in building, but also in running, since each klystron is going to take a prodigious amount of power). The former is limited by technological constraints on how much power you can produce (given the stringent timing requirements necessary in any accelerator).

As for a circular collider, the injection of energy is no longer a major problem -- since the beam can travel around the ring as often as necessary, the RF generators are not the limiting factor. Rather, the trick is building magnets strong enough to hold them in the ring, since the magnetic field required to get a particle to travel in a circular path is dependent on the particle energy. Again, there are two possible ways to deal with the problem: (1) build stronger magnets, or (2) build a bigger ring (which reduces the force needed), and again, the former is a technological issue, while the latter is cost-constrained.

Now for the luminosity side of things. First, I'll need to define some terms. Suppose you have an object, and you fire a wide stream of bullets at it (where the width of the stream is much bigger than the object). It should be obvious that the number of bullets that hit the object is going to be dependent on (a) the rate of bullet-firing and (b) the cross-sectional area of the object. For particle physics, the story is much the same. We define a quantity called the "cross section" which is essentially the probability of a given interaction occurring, and then the total number of that interaction we would expect is given by the "rate" (which is called the luminosity) times the cross section. The cross section is usually expressed in units of "barns" (a particle physics joke derived from the expression "as easy to hit as the broad side of a barn"), and typically the luminosity is expressed in units of inverse cross section per time. So, if my accelerator has a luminosity of 5 inverse picobarns per second, that means if I have a particular interaction with a cross section of 2 picobarns, that means I would expect to see 10 of that interaction per second.

All right, hopefully you understood most of that. (If not, don't worry too much; the rest of this article doesn't depend that much on it.) Now, for a wide variety of practical reasons, a typical beam in a particle accelerator is not a continuous stream of particles, but rather a series of bunches -- you have a bunch of particles, then a gap, then another bunch, and so forth. So, it should be clear that if you want to increase the luminosity, you have (once again) two options: (1) increase the number of particles in each bunch, or (2) decrease the spacing between bunches.

Option (2) seems like the simpler one. It is primarily limited by the speed of your readout electronics -- you need to be able to finish reading out one event before the next one comes. As you might expect, this is one area where there's been a lot of progress in recent years. The electronics used in ATLAS, for example, will be so fast that the particles from one interaction won't have even finished travelling through the detector before the next interaction happens. But the electronics are fast enough to handle this, so it's OK. (You might worry that a faster particle from a later interaction might "catch up", but since all of the particles, even the lowest-energy ones, are travelling very near the speed of light, this is not a big concern.)

Option (1) has a few drawbacks as well. For a proton-antiproton collider, like the Tevatron, the obvious disadvantage is that you have to have the particles in the first place -- you can't stuff more antiprotons in each bunch if you don't have any more antiprotons to begin with. This is not a problem for proton-proton or electron colliders, since protons and electrons are easy to make, and positrons are much easier to make than antiprotons. Another issue is that the more particles you stuff into a single bunch, the more likely you'll get multiple interactions in a single bunch crossing; this is not the end of the world (especially since most of them are likely to be uninteresting); indeed, ATLAS plans to typically have (if I recall correctly) about seven interactions in every bunch crossing, but it does make your reconstruction task more difficult (and thus makes greater demands on your detector, since it needs to be able to distinguish these different interactions). Finally, more particles in a bunch makes them harder to focus, since these particles (all having the same charge) will naturally tend to repel each other, so keeping them in a confined volume becomes trickier the more of them you have.

Anyway, those are all of the "big picture" issues I can think of an an accelerator. Of course there are hundreds of tinier issues that I've glossed over or not mentioned at all, as I'm sure you'll rapidly discover when you try to build your own particle accelerator. What do you mean, you weren't planning on doing that?

Cake
I originally posted this as a comment to Matt's blog, but given the lack of content on here lately (surprise!) I figured it deserved a wider (huh?) audience.

So, here's my ranking of all of the Cake songs I know. This includes all of Fashion Nugget, Prolonging the Magic, and Comfort Eagle; all of Motorcade of Generosity except "You Part the Waters", which my mental iPod couldn't come up with, and "No Phone", the only track I've heard off of Pressure Chief. Conveniently, this totals 50 in all.

Note that these rankings are off the top of my head and probably are highly mutable, given the interchangeability of so many of their songs.

1. Jolene (Motorcade of Generosity)
2. The Distance (Fashion Nugget)
3. I Will Survive (Fashion Nugget)
4. Cool Blue Reason (Prolonging the Magic)
5. Comfort Eagle (Comfort Eagle)
6. Friend Is a Four-Letter Word (Fashion Nugget)
7. When You Sleep (Prolonging the Magic)
8. Satan Is My Motor (Prolonging the Magic)
9. No Phone (Pressure Chief)
10. Rock 'n' Roll Lifestyle (Motorcade of Generosity)
11. Shadow Stabbing (Comfort Eagle)
12. Never There (Prolonging the Magic)
13. Short Skirt/Long Jacket (Comfort Eagle)
14. Ain't No Good (Motorcade of Generosity)
15. Open Book (Fashion Nugget)
16. You Turn the Screws (Prolonging the Magic)
17. Arco Arena (Comfort Eagle)
18. Mexico (Prolonging the Magic)
19. World of Two (Comfort Eagle)
20. Frank Sinatra (Fashion Nugget)
21. Pretty Pink Ribbon (Comfort Eagle)
22. Sheep Go to Heaven (Prolonging the Magic)
23. Opera Singer (Comfort Eagle)
24. Mr. Mastodon Farm (Motorcade of Generosity)
25. Stickshifts and Safetybelts (Fashion Nugget)
26. Commissioning a Symphony in C (Comfort Eagle)
27. Guitar (Prolonging the Magic)
28. Is This Love? (Motorcade of Generosity)
29. Daria (Fashion Nugget)
30. I Bombed Korea (Motorcade of Generosity)
31. Meanwhile, Rick James... (Comfort Eagle)
32. Where Would I Be? (Prolonging the Magic)
33. Haze of Love (Motorcade of Generosity)
34. Race Car Ya-Yas (Fashion Nugget)
35. Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps (Fashion Nugget)
36. Ruby Sees All (Motorcade of Generosity)
37. Long Line of Cars (Comfort Eagle)
38. She'll Come Back to Me (Fashion Nugget)
39. It's Coming Down (Fashion Nugget)
40. Up So Close (Motorcade of Generosity)
41. Love You Madly (Comfort Eagle)
42. Comanche (Motorcade of Generosity)
43. Walk on By (Prolonging the Magic)
44. Jesus Wrote a Blank Check (Motorcade of Generosity)
45. Let Me Go (Prolonging the Magic)
46. Sad Songs and Waltzes (Fashion Nugget)
47. Pentagram (Motorcade of Generosity)
48. Hem of Your Garment (Prolonging the Magic)
49. Nugget (Fashion Nugget)
50. Alpha Beta Parking Lot (Prolonging the Magic)

Thought of the day

Think of as many temporally-based names as you can. These have to be names that you can think of actual people having, not just things that "could be" a name. Here's all of the names my coworkers and I could think up:

April, May, June, Summer, Autumn, Dawn, Sunrise, Sunset, Christmas (OK, I can only think of one example of this, but still, it counts), and Thursday (this one is kinda cheating).

Notice something they have in common? They're all female names. Can you think of any temporal names which are male? (And people actually have to have this name for it to count.) The only one I can think of is the knight January in one of the Canterbury Tales (damned if I can remember which one), but that's iffy at best.

Odd.

Oh, joy!

Of all the webcomics that have come and gone in the time that I was reading them, it was Nothing Nice to Say that I missed the most. Like Penny Arcade, Nothing Nice has an exceedingly rare trait: though 99% of the time Mitch Clem was referring to a band (or game, in Penny Arcade's case) that I had never heard of, or at least not heard enough of to get any inside references, it was still exceptionally, and consistently funny. The thing that made me saddest about the comic was all of the stupid mail that he received, which made me realize just what a thankless task nearly any webcartoonist has, but which also made me realize that he simply wouldn't be able to keep it up forever. And so it was no surprise when NN2S finally went away, but it was a sad event.

I still kept it in my bookmarks, and in those days when I was really, really bored I'd go to visit again, in the hopes that it would be back. But no, it never was; for a while the domain name had even expired, but I still couldn't bring myself to delete the bookmark, and eventually the domain came back but there was nothing there...

And today, I was reading Questionable Content (my best recent webcomic discovery), and it mentioned Nothing Nice to Say, and I did a double-take, and I clicked the link, and it was back! Yay! And has been back for a month! I have no idea how long this will last, but I'll be glad as long as it's still around.

How to build a particle detector
(also part 1 in an occasional series)

Why am I writing this? Well, I've learned quite a bit on the subject in the last couple of years, and I wanted to share that knowledge in a simple, easy-to-read form. If this fails to interest you, feel free to ignore it.

Anyway, let's consider the purpose of a particle detector. You have one beam of particles coming in from one side, another beam (usually of antiparticles) coming in from the other side, and they collide, hopefully producing new and interesting particles. Your job is to detect as many of these new particles as possible, measuring their properties as completely as you can.

The first consideration is the overall shape. Obviously, when an interesting collision occurs, the new particles will fly off (more or less) randomly in all directions. So, your first thought would be that you want your detector to be a sphere, centered around the point of interaction. This would be true, if collisions only occurred in one solitary point. However, for a variety of reasons, collisions typically occur in an "interaction region" along the beamline a couple of meters long. (To briefly summarize, this increases the number of collisions and thus the odds of actually getting something interesting.) So, your typical particle detector is actually mostly cylindrical centered around this interaction region (usually with caps on the end to catch any stray particles).

The four detectors I know the most about (CDF and D0, the two detectors at Fermilab, the world's current highest-energy collider, and ATLAS and CMS, the two detectors at LHC, which will be the world's highest-energy collider when it opens) all follow the same basic pattern (more or less). If you want to see some layouts, you can see them here:

CDF (or a much nicer PostScript version), D0 (only PostScript, sorry), ATLAS, CMS.

In any case, the general layout in all cases is as follows:

* Closest to the beamline is a silicon detector. The silicon detector is designed for very-high-resolution tracking. This is extremely important to the physics, since some of the particles produced in the initial interaction have very short lifetimes and will thus travel a short distance before decaying again. Identifying the location of the secondary decays ("secondary vertices" in the parlance) allows us to see the presence of these short-lived particles.

The technology used in these silicon detectors is not too different from the technology used in ordinary digital cameras. The detector is made of several layers, each containing a large number of appropriately-prepared silicon strips or pixels. When a particle hits a strip, it knocks off some electrons. By applying a voltage to the strip, these electrons will move to one end, where they can be collected and measured. The big difference between this and your digital camera, of course, is that these detectors operate in an extremely demanding environment. In order to operate at the necessary speeds, very high voltages are are used (typically a few thousand volts), which in turn generates a lot of heat (the silicon can literally melt within minutes if the cooling system fails). Furthermore, the high dose of radiation received this close to the interactions puts a high strain on the electronics used. All in all, it's not an easy job.

The silicon detector is typically not very large. The original CDF silicon detector used is maybe the size of two coffee cans on top of each other; the current one is approximately a foot in diameter and three feet in length (about the size of a large trash can), with some additional layers further out. This is partially because most of these secondary vertices are very close to the interaction point, and partially because the silicon is very expensive.

In general, the amount of silicon is usually limited by cost considerations; over the past 10 years, technology improvement has allowed most detectors to considerably expand their silicon coverage. CMS, in fact, uses silicon for all of their tracking (so they don't have a general-purpose tracker as described below).

* Outside of the silicon tracker is a larger, general-purpose tracker. This is typically a few meters in diameter and a few meters in length. The details vary from detector to detector, but the basic principle is almost always a "drift chamber": you have a large cylinder filled with gas (usually argon or some mix), and some wires running along the length of a cylinder. You apply a positive voltage to some of the wires and a negative voltage to some of the other wires. Again, particles passing through the gas will create some ions, which will drift toward the wires (hence the name) where they can be measured. In CDF, many wires are present in a "cell", while in ATLAS, each wire is isolated in its own "straw".

Drift chambers are a sturdy, (relatively) simple, and (relatively) cheap technology, and they provide good resolution, though obviously not as good as the silicon detectors.

The tracking chambers are typically enclosed in a powerful magnetic field. This magnetic field bends the path of charged particles, so that their momenta can be measured by how much the track is curved (higher-momentum particles will curve less).

* Calorimetry: In contrast to the trackers, where a goal is to disturb the particles as little as possible so that their track can be measured as accurately as possible, the calorimeters have the exact opposite goal: to absorb all of the energy of the particle so that the energy can be accurately measured. Unlike the tracker, where silicon has emerged as the dominant choice, there are a wide variety of technologies used in calorimetry.

The most straightforward way, conceptually speaking, is to use a material which has strong stopping power and emits light as the particles deposit their energy in the material. Then the amount of energy that the particle originally had can be measured by the amount of light emitted. Unfortunately, such materials don't grow on trees; CMS uses crystals of lead tungstate, but these are expensive to fabricate and maintain.

A compromise solution (used in CDF, D0, and ATLAS) is to alternate slabs of a material with strong stopping power (typically lead or steel) with slabs of a material which emits light (either a plastic scintillator or liquid argon). This is much cheaper than the first alternative, since all of the materials are easily available, but at the cost of some resolution. This is called a "sampling" calorimeter.

Calorimetry is, while an extremely valuable technique, inherently limited in its precision: as a particle interacts with the material of the calorimeter, it produces a large "shower" of secondary particles created by the interaction, and measuring the energy from all particles in a shower is inherently imperfect.

Typically, calorimeters are divided into two parts: the inner, or "electromagnetic", section absorbs particles which deposit their energy rapidly (electrons, photons, and pi-zeros), while the outer, or "hadronic" section absorbes heavier particles (hadrons) which lose energy less quickly.

* Muon chambers: Ideally, in the calorimeters everything is absorbed, with two exceptions: neutrinos, which can't (practically speaking) be detected by anything in an ordinary particle detector, and muons. A muon, which is a heavier relative of an electron, is extremely penetrating, and will make it through the lead or steel of the calorimeter without being terribly affected. So, typically, outside the calorimeter there's another tracker which detects the muons (and, occasionally, incoming cosmic rays). This tracker is usually another set of drift chambers, like the central tracker, but with much less demanding specifications (the central tracker has to deal with hundreds of particles in a very small area, while the muon chambers typically only have one or two muons to detect in a much larger area). Muons are very useful as triggers, since the presence of a muon almost always signals that something interesting has happened, so the muon chambers (which tend to be pretty slow) are usually supplemented with fast scintillators (which don't give you much position information, but which do tell you that a muon has passed by) to provide a trigger.

There are, of course, lots of other, smaller, systems involved in a detector, but these are the principal ones.

Musical Interlude #1
(Part of an occasional series, I hope.)

It might not surprise you to learn that the first semester of my senior year in high school (OMG THAT WAS TEN YEARS AGO [hush, you, it's barely more than nine]) was not one of the happiest periods of my life. Sure, my junior year was great, but by senior year, there was the stress of college applications, I had assumed a little more responsibility in various organizations than I was perhaps ready for, and I desperately, desperately needed a girlfriend -- for the sake of brevity, let's just say that things had not been going so well on that front by the time a dark December night rolled around. On that particular night, I had to do a paper for my AP American Government class (on Texas v. Johnson, if my memory serves me correctly). I had put it off to the last moment, as usual, and about 9, I set off for the USF library. (Since my father, at that time, was still teaching for USF, I would occasionally borrow his ID so I could use the library there. The principal advantage was the extended hours, which I was taking advantage of in this case.) Anyway, to sum everything up, I wasn't in the best of moods when I set off, and by the time I arrived, the darkness and the loneliness and the stress had combined to make me miserable. Then, just as I was pulling into a parking spot, a song came over the radio. I sat there in the car and listened to the whole thing, and it was so beautiful, it had a nearly magical effect on me. By the time I got out of the car, I still had work to do, but it felt manageable and I wasn't so unhappy about everything. It's the first time I can recall that a piece of music had anywhere near that profound an effect on me.

Needless to say, while I've tried to replicate this effect later, it's never been quite the same. It was just once of those unique confluences, the right event at the right time, and I'm sure that trying to make it happen probably makes it less likely to work, too. It's still a pretty little piece, though. That piece was the Bergamasca from Ottorino Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances Suite No. 2. (This was back in the days when I still listened to classical music on the radio some of the time. But that's for another story.)

Comments are now fixed
Looks like the change from PHP3 to PHP4 broke the comments. I shold probably junk this old commenting system and get something more modern. Hopefully comment spam won't become a problem. If it does, that might force my hand.

Incidentally, if you did try to comment, it was never recorded, so it's lost into the void. Not that I suspect this is a big problem.

The obligatory technical issues post
It looks like comments aren't working (probably broken by the move to the new bantha), so if you're dying to leave your wisdom here, you'll just have to wait a bit. I'll try to fix them today.

Celebrating one year of inactivity...oh, damn.

Well, it's now been one year since the last post here. I see that the Blogger interface has changed considerably.

Anyhow, if you're wondering if I'm planning to resurrect the blog, probably not. But there are still occasionally things that I want to post. For instance, the other day we were eating at Fuddrucker's in Emeryville after watching House of Flying Daggers. The sound system was playing the usual extra-schmaltzy Christmas-season music, when suddenly, I noticed an extraordinarily familiar melody: the Troika from the Lt. Kije Suite. You can color me pleasantly surprised.

There's a couple of longer posts which will appear here in the next couple of days.

Iowa madness
Well, I'm procrastinating, so what better way to do it?

Anyway, I was as surprised as anyone by the Iowa caucus results, having pretty much resigned myself to a Dean march to the nomination, whether I liked it or not.

I'm still deeply ambivalent about Kerry. Whenever I actually read something about him (which hasn't been all that often lately, for obvious reasons), I always end up feeling good about him, and from a tactical standpoint he has the requisite gravitas on security issues to compete with Bush (though he arguably overdoes it), but I can't help but worry that the REpublicans will be able to succesfully brand him as another New England patrician. I feel like invoking the name of Dukakis is a little unfair to him, but how can I help it?

Well, it certainly seems like all of the arrows that Dean took as the frontrunner ended up taking their toll on him; the question is whether Kerry will end up suffering the same fate, or whether he can avoid accumulating the amount of dislike that seems to have sunk Dean.

I hate, hate, hate the New York sports media
Why, you ask? Because they have to subject the rest of us to their preposterous rumors. If I don't want to read about how the Warriors should trade Mike Dunleavy and Calbert Cheaney for Tracy McGrady, all I have to do is avoid the loonier message boards. But trying to escape from rumors that the Knicks are on the verge of trading Kurt Thomas and Charlie Ward for Nick Van Exel is impossible. Never mind the fact that anyone not located within the boundaries of greater New York realizes that Kurt Thomas and Charlie Ward are worth about a large Slurpee. Never mind the fact that the Warriors repeatedly denied that they had any interest at all in the deal (thus proving that, for all their other failings, they're at least not total idiots). No, as long it's something the New York fans would like to see happen, it's something we have to read about. (Note that the Knicks finally did succeed in moving Charlie Ward. The Suns showed their appreciation of his fantastic value by promptly cutting him.)

Now, I read some drivel that the Mets are interested in signing Vladimir Guerrero. Note that the story does not say anything about Guerrero being interested in signing with the Mets. Nor should it, given that the Mets' offer is substantially lower than the Expos offer he's already rejected, and also substantially lower than the offer he's discussing with the Orioles. And yet, it's news. Why? Because it's something New York would like to see happen, of course. (Why wouldn't they?) Even worse than this initial report is this Bob Klapisch bleating about why Vlad should come to New York, despite the lack of money. (Never mind the fact that all previous reports have indicated that New York is not a place where he would want to play; if the Mets want to sign him, well then of course he would want to play there!) The Mets have had a pretty decent offseason, but for Klapisch to glowingly describe Braden Looper as "the best available closer" is just the kind of thing that drives me batty.

The whole story on the A-Rod issue
I just saw this article, and I think it has the most complete account of the A-Rod deal that I've seen. Interesting reading.

Interesting legal issue of the day
I won't try to summarize this, so I'll just give you this link.

Caution: Contains descriptions of pornographic acts.

And now, the other side of the below entry
Apparently, some conservative sites, like Free Republic, do this kind of thing too!

*pause for surprised reactions*

Yeah, that's what I thought. Anyway, I'm certainly not going to attack their right to do so, either.

My two cents on comment "censorship"
So I was going to post this as a comment on Matt's blog, but I figured I had enough to say that it deserved my own entry. Plus, I haven't posted anything here in a while, so this gives me the chance to kill two birds with one stone.

Anyway, apparently the official blog of the DNC, Kicking Ass, will delete comments with opposing viewpoints. This has got some people all hot and bothered. As you might have guessed from the scare quotes in the title, I'm somewhat less concerned about it. My dismissal rests on two points, one practical and one theoretical:

1) Practially speaking, what exactly do these Republican commentators hope to accomplish by posting argumentation on Kicking Ass? If their goal is to convince the blog writers that they're wrong, then they're idiots. This is not going to happen. Perhaps they would claim that they are trying to convince undecided centrists. If so, they should convince me first that there are really any undecided centrists reading Kicking Ass; if I were an undecided centrist, I certainly would not expect the official blog of the DNC to be a source meeting my political needs. Really, the only thing that they're doing is engaging in argumentation for argumentation's sake, and I have no hesitation in calling that completely unproductive.

2) On a more theoretical note, why would they expect any different? Comments are under no obligation to always be a forum for free exchange of ideas. The main purpose of Kicking Ass, at least as I would see it, is not to be a place for equal discussion among all political viewpoints; it's a place to mobilize people who already have one particular viewpoint. Why should they be under any obligation to entertain others, then?

Restaurant recommendation
So we used to eat at the Hot Pot City on University every so often (it was even a tradition, for a while, to eat there after a Simbase draft), so I was a little disappointed when it went under. Then a new Japanese restaurant, Tanaka, sprang up there, and I decided that I wanted to try it to see if it was a worthy successor to HPC. When we took everyone out to dinner who had helped us to move (and thank you, everyone!), I thought this would be as good a time as any to try it.

Anyway, to say that the atmosphere inside was a little different from the old Hot Pot City would be a minor understatement -- Juliana even wondered if we were dressed well enough -- but we were all very pleasantly surprised by the quality and quantity of the food (the latter often being difficult to get at a Japanese restaurant without paying a lot of money!) And despite all of that, the prices were less than I would have expected.

Plus, it's very near our new place. This is good.

An accumulation of random things from the past couple of weeks
1) Where does the thing where a person looks at his face in a mirror after surgery, laughs maniacally, and then smashes the mirror come from? I've seen it parodied a million times, but I have no idea what the source is.

2) For some reason, there's been a number of articles on Wal-Mart lately. One of them had a comment at the end (I'm too lazy to look it up at the moment) which said something like, "We all want someone else to buy the more expensive goods." And this is really what it all comes down to, isn't it? It's one big Prisoner's Dilemma. If everyone were willing to pay a little bit more for goods, then the economy would probably be in better shape overall, since stores would be able to afford things like keeping production in America, but each individual customer feels that they're better off buying at Wal-Mart (true), and so we end up in the Nash equilibrium.

3) I know I've commented on this before, but I find this really puzzling. The suffix -let is normally a diminutive (eaglet, wavelet, etc.) But when used to apply to professions, it usually means not only young, but also female. I can call Britney Spears a pop starlet, but I certainly can't call Justin Timberlake a starlet. I can call Kate Bosworth a movie starlet, but not Hayden Christensen. Yet an eaglet doesn't have to be female...

4) You know that your monitor emits radio-frequency emissions, right? (This is actually, theoretically at least, a potential security concern -- it's not inconceivable that someone could read what's on your monitor with a sufficiently sensitive radio receiver.) Well, this program can use those emissions to transmit music by putting the appropriate patterns on your monitor.

Public service announcement
All right, if you're wondering why the lack of updates lately, it's at least partially because I've been busy moving. And it'll still probably be another week before I get broadband (whine!) so I'll probably be intermittent at best.

Thank you for your patience,
The Management

The things I have to deal with at work
Mostly I'm just writing this out for my own benefit, so I can see its awfulness with my own eyes.

In order to run the main hybrid test program I use here at work, I
1) run a Perl script, which nicely generates the arguments and passes them to...
2) a shell script, whose main purpose is to call...
3) another shell script (written in tcsh), which checks that everything is in order and then calls...
4) a C program with an embedded Tcl interpreter, whose first action is to call...
5) a Tcl script, which again checks that everything is in order and then calls....
6) a C routine within (4) to run the main testing program.

Just to confuse things more, (2) and (5) are actually the same file, with some cleverly-written half-commented shell at the beginning so that it'll go to (3) when called as a shell script and (6) when invoked as a Tcl script.

Needless to say, if I had my druthers, I'd rip out 90% of this labyrinth. Sadly, I don't...at least for now.

Literary game #2
This question seems surprisingly hard: What book titles can you think of which are also complete sentences?

So far I can come up with two: Atlas Shrugged and No One Writes to the Colonel. You'd think that with all of the literature out there, I'd be able to come up with more, but it's just that they're all noun phrases (or, in a few cases, prepositional phrases, like Around the World in 80 Days).

Literary game #1
Here's a question I've been turning over in my mind for a little while: What words sound like they should mean the opposite of what they actually do mean?

"Temerity" is the big one here. It always seems to me that it should mean "timidity", rather than the opposite. The other one is "truculent", which I feel should mean something more like "obsequious".

Blah
So I had another quizbowl tournament this weekend, the combined TRASH regionals/Technophobia at Caltech. Overall it was a good experience, and I certainly can't complain about our performance, but it was a lot of quizbowl -- we ended up playing well past 1 on Friday night, and then twelve more rounds on Saturday.

I think every time I have to drive back from LA, I enjoy it a little less. And given that I didn't exactly love the drive the first time around, I wouldn't complain too loudly if we never went to any more tournaments down in the southern part of the state. Of course, this time was bad just because I was so tired and it was rainy, which made driving just that little bit more difficult. In better circumstances, I probably wouldn't have minded too much.

My 2 cents on the Confederate flag uproar
Not much to say that hasn't been said elsewhere, but to me, this tells me two things:
1) The other Democrats are desperate to blunt Dean's momentum. The way that they've seized onto this issue, it looks like they're desperate for an angle with which they can gain an edge (to ruthlessly mix metaphors).
2) Fundamentally, Dean is right, even if he didn't exactly express himself in the best way possible. However, I can't see the Democratic party reversing its losses in the South in the near future without a major sea change.

Two political links of the day
First, the most distinctive ballot measure you're likely to see (not counting San Francisco's Proposition BB of about ten years back, which is a close contender): this measure in Bolinas.

Second, apparently the Democratic party switched from winner-take-all primaries to proportional representation. Yes, really. This should make for an interesting convention. Read about it in CalPundit.

Political question of the day
There's no shortage of actors who have become Republican politicians. There are the obvious examples (Schwarzenegger, Reagan), and I'm sure without too much difficulty you could find a bunch more minor people (Fred Thompson, Sonny Bono, Fred Grandy, etc.). However, when Juliana and I were searching on this question the other day, we were able to find one actor who became a Democratic politician: Ben Jones, who played "Cooter" on the Dukes of Hazzard. He served two terms in the House (winning his first term after the incumbent was indicted for perjury), and made a few more unsuccessful House runs. As far as profile goes (both as an actor and as a politician), it's considerably lower than the Republican side of the ledger. And according to this article, he's only the third ever, after Helen Gahagan Douglas (who was a theater actress) and Shiela Kuehl, a California State Senator with a rather undistinguished acting career. Hardly an impressive slate.

To me, at least, while some of the reasons are obvious, it seems surprising that the disparity would be that large. Anyway, this post was inspired by seeing this article.

Technical note, concluded
Okay, I think I've fixed the issue with the comments. Let me know if there appear to be any problems.

For those interested in the details: At some point when I wasn't looking, probably when Blogger changed their engine, they moved from 8-digit post ID numbers, which are reasonable, to 18-digit post ID numbers, which strike me, personally, as just a little bit of overkill, but what do I know? Anyway, in the past, the post ID numbers were passed to the comment script as numbers, and everything was fine. But now, passing an 18-digit number as a number gets it truncated. So I changed things to pass their numbers as strings, and it should work happily.

Technical note
For some reason, the number of comments for new entries isn't properly displaying (at least, not in my browsers). My teams of top scientists are working on the problem. But if I don't acknowledge your comment, it's probably because I haven't even noticed it's there.

Interesting legal issue of the day
So, I'm not an expert on copyright law, but I have read enough to have heard of Feist v. Rural Telephone (though I don't think I would be able to remember the name offhand). To make a long story short, a white pages publisher used information from a rival company's directory; the other company sued for copyright infringement, but the Court ruled that the information in the white pages, being factual, was not entitled to copyright protection, and the presentation, being merely alphabetical, was not sufficiently original to warrant protection either.

Now, it appears possible that these actions might be made illegal. I'm actually of a very mixed opinion about this. I suppose the sticking point is that after a company has put all this work in to create a database of information, it doesn't seem fair to me (for lack of a better term) for another company to be able to take it and make money from it. It's the last point which is key, at least in my own personal ethical system. (It's also why, of the two bills mentioned in the article, I would vastly prefer the spirit of the Bliley version; I obviously benefit from having directory information available online for free.)

I learned of this initially when reading about baseball-reference.com. b-r is simply the best baseball reference site there is, and I frequently use it and am very glad to have it as a free resource. (I believe it's also the only website I've outright donated money to -- this was well before their sponsorship system, and though there was an offer to use old donations towards sponsorship, I didn't really want to bother.) b-r gets a large (though declining, these days) percentage of its information from Sean Lahman's baseball database, which is also free. But what I didn't know is that, apparently, much of the original information in the Lahman database was extracted from a CD-ROM version of Total Baseball, which is not a free product. And, oddly, though I know that this process was (and is, for now) perfectly legal, it still makes me feel a little uneasy. I know it doesn't make sense.

On a more pessimistic note
Despite my ill-founded optimism below, I have to admit that now is not the best of times to be a Bay Area sports fan. Not counting the minor teams (which actually have done quite well, with the Earthquakes and CyberRays both bringing home a title in 2001, and the Sabercats winning in 2002), none of the area teams has won a title since the Niners won the Super Bowl in '94 (well, technically the Super Bowl itself was '95, but it was for the '94 season), and none seem particularly well-positioned to in the future. I don't need to tell anyone here how close the Giants came in 2002, but they probably can't win with their current personnel (especially given the age of a lot of the team) and they don't seem to have the money (and definitely don't seem to have the minor-league talent) to replace them, with Magowan looking to cut payroll. The A's are probably going to stay in contention for a few years, but it'll require a steady stream of shrewd dealings and good minor-league developments just to keep them treading water, given their financial constraints; it's hard to see them getting noticeably better in the near future, so essentially they'll need a healthy dose of playoff luck to get a title, and they haven't exactly been showing that in spades. The 49ers are in a similar situation: while it looks that the team they'll have is going to be at least competitive, I can't see it getting measurably better in the near future, and I can see it getting a lot worse if they fail to retain a lot of their current players. York's performance as an owner has not exactly inspired confidence so far, either. The Raiders, like the Giants, came close in 2002 (though the '03 Super Bowl was much less close than the '02 World Series), but they also were looking at a very short window of opportunity, and judging by their performance and injury record this year, it looks like it's already closed. The Warriors, though I might be optimistic about their relative performance, are not going to contend for a title any time in the foreseeable future. And finally, the Sharks, which were a trendy pick for a Stanley Cup winner a year ago despite never even reaching the conference finals, instead sunk straight to the basement, traded away all of their talent, and saw the one player who looked like he might be a franchise cornerstone (Nabokov) instead revert to mediocrity. Since they're also cursed with penny-pinching ownership, the outlook here is not so good.

Well, at least I have all these past memories to console me...of course, they only apply to the Niners anyway.

Minor annoyances at work
There are two things which happen at work which annoy me disproportionately:
1) People taking the elevator for one floor. I always take the elevator in the mornings from the basement to the sixth floor, and in the evenings I make the reverse trip. I'm always astounded by the number of people who will hop on the elevator to go up or down just one floor. I frequently have to go down to the 5th floor, and I always use the stairs. What's the point of taking the elevator?

2) People who don't run for the bus. If the bus is sitting there, and you're late (I can understand not making an effort if you know the bus isn't going to leave yet), then it's more than a little inconsiderate to nonchalantly stroll to the bus and expect everyone to wait for you. Show some hustle!

Yes, I know that not everyone at the Lab is in as good physical condition as me (not to say that I'm in great condition, but at least I'm young and healthy). But these are perpetrated by all sorts of people.

I know I'm a fool to type this...
...but I'm actually moderately optimistic about the Warriors. Oh, don't get me wrong; I'm hardly expecting them to make the playoffs, but I think they could actually be decent this year. Starting the season with two of their top players hurt and another suspended, they managed to pull out a victory over a decent team and hung in against two of the best teams in the league. And that's all I need for unsupported early-season optimism!

Very random link
Hey, I think it would be cool to have one of these.

Lyrics quiz!
This is a very amusing variant on the old lyrics quiz (it's fill-in-the-blank, rather than just name-the-song). The comments in the scoring were also good. Overall, though, my score was pathetic (32). See if you can do better!

How I spent my Saturday
So today was the first major quizbowl tournament of the fall that I actually participated in (unlike WIT, two weekends ago, where I merely staffed). Now, the Berkeley team has been thriving lately; overall, we fielded five teams, each with a full complement of 4 team members. This was good! Of course, this also meant that we thus comprised 5/8 of the teams and 20/29 of the people, so a lot of the matches were intra-Berkeley matches. Still, it's a good way for the newbies to get tournament experience.

We figured if we concentrated all of the good players, then the newbie teams would just spend all of their time getting whomped; given that this tournament was 14 rounds and, total, took over 7 hours, this is not exactly a fun way to spend your day. So, instead, we spread the strength around -- with the exception of the Bastard Team, which had the two people not currently enrolled (Juliana and Ray), Nick, and David Farris (who just decided to play at the last minute). This had the very beneficial effect of making the overall field very even -- no team had fewer than 3 losses, and only one team (with 2 wins) had fewer than 5 wins. So, I certainly hope much fun was had by all.

Overall, my team was 5-9. That looks worse than it is, I think; we had three rounds which were decided on the last tossup, and we lost them all. I definitely was very streaky; there were some rounds where I did excellently, and there are some rounds (and some particular buzzes within those rounds) where I did poorly. The newbies on my team also acquitted themselves well, so that was definitely a good sign, especially since at Technophobia (next weekend) we are tossing them onto teams by themselves, since we figure it'll have to happen sooner or later and it'll be as good a tournament as any to start with.

Anyway, after a marathon like that, I think I could use some sleep.

Sports observation of the day
The economics of sports just keep getting weirder and weirder.

Basketball, with its odd soft salary cap, still leads the league in bizarre transactions for financial reasons. For example, this past offseason, the Atlanta Hawks participated in a trade in which they traded away someone who had scored more than 20 points per game for them that year (namely, Glenn Robinson), in order to obtain a player who was on the injured list with injuries that were likely to prevent him from ever playing again and had announced that he was retiring (Terrell Brandon), solely for the purpose of obtaining salary-cap space. (To be fair, the Hawks also did move up a bit in draft picks, but that part is unlikely to matter. All of the quotes from Atlanta officials indicated that they were interested primarily in obtaining the cap room.)

I believe at one point (though I don't remember enough details to find it via Google) that the Clippers, owned by notorious cheapskate Donald Sterling, once obtained some players in a trade which they then promptly waived, just in order to meet the salary floor. But I could be misremembering on that.

Now, baseball, despite not having any official salary caps and floors, has been seeing more and more economically-driven transactions of late. The Rockies, for example, practically gave away Mike Hampton just to be rid of his contract (hey, the faint voice in my mind is telling me that I already wrote something about this), but at least they got something in return. In general, teams trading away good players with overinflated contracts have gotten less back then if they had a reasonable contract, and bad players with big contracts are essentially of negative value in trade discussions, but it's not the case that a good player with an overinflated contract has actually been a negative.

Until now, that is. The Red Sox placed Manny Ramirez on irrevocable waivers on Wednesday, meaning that anyone willing to pick up the 5 years and $101.5 million left on his contract could have him without sending anything back to the Red Sox in return -- and no one was interested. Now, no one doubts that Ramirez is one of the top hitters in the league; he's been in the top 10 in MVP voting for five years running, and this year is extremely likely to be a sixth; it's just that no one wanted to pay that much money. Is that weird?

Well...maybe not as weird as it might seem at first glance. You see, at the end of 2000, Manny Ramirez was a free agent. Thus, when the Sox signed him, they were, pretty much by definition, the team that had the highest valuation of what his services were worth. So, given that Ramirez hasn't improved substantially over the past three seasons (not to say that he's been a disappointment, either; his production has pretty much been in line with reasonable expectations), it stands to reason that the Sox' valuation would still be higher than anyone else's; that is, that no one else would want to have him for the price that the Sox were paying him.

There's been a lot written about how free agency creates a "Winner's Curse", in that the team that signs a player in free agency is always the team that overestimates the player's value by the greatest amount, so I won't bother rehashing that, but I wonder if people realize that this is essentially the same thing, just three years later.

The die is cast
In other news, I went in and gave our landlord the obligatory written notice that we'll be moving out at the end of November, so I'm now officially committed to moving out. I'm hoping that the housing search will go somewhat more smoothly than the last time I did it (and was that really three years ago?!), especially since, well, I only have a month to find somewhere new.

The place itself I have no particular regrets about leaving; after all, you don't need me to tell you its negatives. If anything, I'm mostly annoyed that I didn't leave a while ago. However, finding somewhere new and then going through the whole process of actually moving there is still not something I'm looking forward to. So if you're reading this, it's highly likely I'm going to draft you to help me move at some point.

*shiver*
So, over the weekend, we were enjoying the proverbial Bay Area Indian Summer -- it more commonly is around in late September/early October, but I guess it was a little late this year, because all of a sudden it was nice and warm. Then, it just went away, and all of a sudden it's really cold. And today it was raining!

Boo. Lousy winter.

And now, back to sports
Or more specifically, fantasy sports.

It might surprise you to learn that, for all of my baseball fanaticism, I've never actually played a season of real, old-fashioned fantasy baseball. Back in college, I used to play ESPN's Baseball Challenge regularly; in 1999 (I think), I was even dedicated enough to employ the tactic of changing my lineup every day to take advantage of matchups, Coors Field, doubleheaders, and so forth, which was enough to get me near the top, though I never got the extra burst of good fortune which would have put me in the top 50 or so. Of course, that way was less fun, since you never got emotionally attached to your players (although certainly, emotional attachment is usually a bad thing if what you're trying to do is win). There is, or at least was, Simbase, which was kind of an outlet for many of my fictional baseball needs, but it's nowhere close to fantasy ball.

This last year, I was dragged into Scoresheet, which is an excellent form of baseball, but it's also quite different. And, to be honest, this year was pretty boring after the draft -- it was readily apparent that the 37 good things that needed to happen for my team to contend weren't going to happen, so mostly I just prepared for next year and was careful not to trade Bret Boone for Chris Hammond because I needed to fill my hole in the bullpen. (Actually, this league is pleasantly free of insultingly bad trade proposals. Of course, it's largely free of trade proposals entirely, which is perhaps not as good.)

With Scoresheet firmly in its offseason, this means that the only fantasy league I'm currently involved in is the LZA, our long-term keeper fantasy basketball league. However, it seems like the fantasy basketball aspects of the LZA are dying (well, actually, have been dying for a while). By its very nature, the LZA requires pretty close involvement from its players to succeed. Being a keeper league naturally requires more care, since every transaction has to be evaluated not only by its impact on this season, but many seasons down the road. And the LZA is also an extraordinarily deep league -- the NBA has 29 teams, with each team having a 12-man active roster and 3 on IR. The LZA has 28 teams, with each team having a 15-man roster with 10 starters. This means that practically everyone in the NBA is going to be seeing playing time in the LZA, so you have to keep track of even the scrubbiest bench players if you're playing to win. When it started out, the LZA certainly drew that level of involvement, but now most people don't seem willing to keep up with it (and my own interest has been flagging over the past few years, too).

This means that, unless Simbase is unexpectedly resurrected sometime soon, it's likely that Scoresheet will be my only fantasy outlet. And that's just fine with me.

Usenet sociological note #25831
I still read a surprising amount of regular Usenet -- not as much as I did in past days, but probably still more than I ought -- but I still post very infrequently. Mostly, this is because I have to meet three criteria before I'll actually bother to post something:
1) No one else has said it
2) Saying it will actually be worthwhile
3) I know what I'm talking about
Mostly, this is because posts violating any of these three criteria irritate me immensely. Repeating what other people have already said (1) is annoying, arguing with trolls or idiots or other people who aren't going to change their mind (2) is really annoying, and getting something wrong that you can easily look up (3) is the most annoying of all.

Of course, given the volume and the nature of Usenet, the likelihood that something I want to say will pass these tests is quite low. So mostly I just content myself with absorbing information.

Yeeek!
So apparently Matt either has much more persistence in checking my blog than I would, has an incredible sense of timing, or is watching me at work, since he managed to spot the fact that I had resumed posting here practically instantly. This, of course, eliminates my option to sneak away quietly if I decided I didn't have enough things to keep my recent spate of posting going. But perhaps that was Matt's devious plan all along...

Reopening old wounds
So, most of the time I'm a regular reader (though infrequent poster) at the Giants newsgroup (that's alt.sports.baseball.sf-giants for those of you who care). Around playoffs, though, a combination of several factors (namely, increased volume, decreased quality, and very strongly decreased desire to read even more about what I had just seen altogether too much of) led to my abandoning the newsgroup. Well, being the compulsive type that I am, I can't just mark all those read and done with and move on to the new stuff; I feel the need to read all of it. It's not that much more pleasant to do so; time has dulled the horror of it all, but it still makes me tremendously disappointed.

It continues to appall me just how easily many of the people in the newsgroup wholeheartedly embraced rooting for the Marlins. I could never bring myself to do so, yes, even though their opposition was the Yankees -- it's at least more excusable to embrace the Marlins under such circumstances, but many of the people had chosen the Marlins before either of the League Championship Series were done, which is just awful, in my opinion. When a team crushes your dreams like that, in such excruciating fashion, I sure as hell am not going to turn around and root for them.

To tie another thread to this skein, it suddenly became cold around here, so I put on my 1997 NL West Champion sweatshirt. I will freely admit that in 1997, things were different. In 1997, the Giants were a surprise team -- no one expected them to do well, and merely making the playoffs was a delightful achievement, after eight years of drought with one particularly painful near-miss in the middle. Sure, I would have been ecstatic if they had managed to do well in the playoffs, but after such a wonderous season it wasn't hard to accept their playoff loss. Under those circumstances, I could have rooted for the Marlins, especially since their ownership hadn't yet been proven evil (though I did actually root for the Indians, since they were more deserving in my opinion, and also had Matt Williams). But the fundamental difference is expectations. In each of the Giants' last three playoff appearances, I've actually hoped that they could win the World Series, and so when they fall short, it's always a bitter disappointment.

Picking on everyone's favorite target
I nearly wrote this to Gregg Easterbrook himself, but decided that he'll probably have enough mail saying the same thing (so why, you might ask, do I feel the desire to post it here, when no one's even reading? Well, mostly as a therapeutic thing. Thanks for reading -- hey, where are you going?)

Anyway, the Easterblogg has this entry. For those of you too lazy to follow the link, he basically says that no one has a problem when science postulates all sorts of invisible, unseen dimensions, but if religion goes and theorizes that there's an unseen spiritual dimension, everyone will think that you're crazy.

Fundamentally, there are two big problems with this argument:
1) It is true, so far, that there is no experimental evidence to support the hypotheses of string theory (specifically, the ones about the number of dimensions lying around). This does not mean that scientists are blithely ignoring the need for experimental evidence sooner or later. Easterbrook references research by Maria Spiropolu; the specific article has made its way into the NYT archives, but other things I've read about her have indicated that what she's looking for is precisely that -- evidence of missing energy in certain reactions which could be explained by additional spatial dimensions in which particles could escape. A couple years ago, I went to a colloquium on possible experimental tests of string theory, and the place was packed. It's an issue of great interest, and to imply that physicists don't care about whether string theory can be verified or falsified is simply not the case. Most of the predictions of string theory, unfortunately, are currently well beyond our experimental reach, but as the theory matures and our experimental abilities (hopefully!) increase, the experimental tests will determine whether the theory enters the realm of generally-accepted scientific fact, or is relegated to the proverbial Dustbin of History.

2) To say that bringing up religion among scientists will get you "laughed out of the room" is patently not the case. It is true, however, that attempting to place religion on an equal footing with science will get you a fair share of scorn, and rightly so. Religion is not science, and by its fundamental nature it is extrascientific. It, by definition, can not ever be verified or tested using the scientific method. This is not to say that it is wrong to believe in it, just that such a belief can never be a scientific one.

Grr, argh
Just in time for Halloween, I'm going to attempt to resurrect this thing from the dead. Be warned, though, that my main motivation for this is a momentary quiet spell at work. I offer no guarantees that this motivation will persist, or even that I'll tell anyone about it. So there.

Well, that was helpful
Headline of the day:
7-foot-5 NBA prospect has pituitary disorder
You don't say.

*bleat*
So for the past week or so, there's been a rather large herd of goats peacefully grazing on the hillsides of the lab. This is actually a pretty clever idea, since the hillsides are pretty steep (although when I actually took a close look at the goats one day while walking to work, it looked like the vegetation was at more risk of being slept on and crushed than actually eaten).

According to the lab e-mail newsletter, the herd is provided "by Goats R Us of Orinda". I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that such a thing exists, but I am amused.

Oh, by the way, you're all cowards
Since no one is apparently brave enough to try my Simpsons quiz, I'll post the answers. See the comment box.

Tinker, tinker
I think my archives should be fixed now; if you're still having problems, let me know. External links should also be fixed, too (I noticed that Matt's link here was broken). The ants link is properly posted in the appropriate post.

Sports rant of the day
So I was reading this game recap, and I happened to notice this quote:
"The shell-shocked right-hander was safely back in the dugout by the time center fielder Jeromy Burnitz misplayed back-to-back line drives by Tim Salmon and Anderson with one out in the fourth, when the Angels scored three runs off Jeremy Griffiths to pad their lead to 10-3.

Salmon's drive went off the glove of the charging Burnitz for a two-run triple, and Anderson's deflected off the beleaguered outfielder's glove for a double as Burnitz tried to one-hand it on the run in right-center. Burnitz, who lives about a 1 1/2-hour drive south of Edison Field in Poway, Ca., has been charged with only one error this season."

Does it strike anyone as just a little bit wrong that an outfielder can "misplay" two balls, and yet both of them get scored as base hits and he escapes with not a single error? This is why the concept of "error" is essentially a completely meaningless one.

I shouldn't even dignify this by linking to it
So, the other day, I was reading Slate, and I was bored -- but I repeat myself. Anyway, I noticed in the margins an ad for this Emode IQ test, and being bored, decided to try it.

Well, let me tell you: I've seen a lot of bad things purporting to measure one's intelligence over the years, but this one is awful even by those standards. Let's start with an example:

8. A fallacious argument is: Disturbing, Valid, False, Necessary

This question would be fine (if vacuous) on the SAT. It has absolutely no place on a test purporting to measure "intelligence". It's pure knowledge. But it gets worse. Consider, for example, this question:

2. Which one of these five is least like the other four? Mule, Kangaroo, Cow, Deer, Donkey

This is far, far worse. Not only is it also another pure-knowledge question, but like any really bad question, you can make pretty persuasive arguments for more than one item in the list: is it a kangaroo, which is a marsupial? Is it a mule, which is a sterile crossbreed? For that matter, is it a deer, which has antlers? Who the hell knows?

But the question that really set me off was this beauty:
25. A cynic is one who knows the price of everything and the ________ of nothing. Emotion, Value, Meaning, Color, Quality

An intelligence test is not a complete-the-proverb exercise. What were they thinking?!

A digression on music theory
So you've probably noticed that Coldplay's "Clocks" is pretty much omnipresent on the radio stations at the moment. Despite this, it's a surprisingly good song.

I'd like to talk about why I think this is an excellent song. This generally proves to be a frustrating exercise for both me and whoever I'm trying to talk to, since I always find myself unable to articulate exactly what I like and dislike in songs. I think that this is partially because, after years of listening to and playing classical music, I've developed an ear for the kinds of harmonies, cadences, and such which "sound good", but despite the rather surprising amount of music theory I've picked up, my pitch recognition skills are inadequate to say "oh, that was a very nice V-ii-I sequence" or somesuch. Heck, most of the time, without thinking about it extensively, I have difficulty picking up the key of a given song. Anyway, I'm sure what I'm going to say is probably somewhat wrong in the details (my music theory skills being quite rusty), but I hope it conveys the feeling well.

But anyway, what I like about this song:
1) It has a very nice sense of motion. This is the quality I most often look for in a song, and yet it's often very difficult for me to explain just where it comes from. Here, though, it's not too difficult: the arpeggiated chords (really, an underappreciated device in my opinion; another example of a song which uses this to great effect is the Doves' "Sea Song") keep the song moving forward, and do so in a very harmonious way. Something you also won't see very often in a song on the radio is this 3-3-2 rhythm (which I guess would be best classified as 8/8), which I think also lends itself to a feeling of motion.

2) It's very harmonious. Like I said, I can't really elaborate on this too much, but the chord progressions are, fundamentally, pretty. Since the harmony is a little more prominent than normal (the melody being pretty nondescript, when it comes right down to it), it's important that it fit together nicely for the resulting product to sound good.

That's really all I have to say. I'm going to go off and listen to it again now.

Irony of the day
So, as many of you know, I recently switched research groups up at LBL, moving me from ATLAS to CDF (if you actually care what those acronyms mean, feel free to ask). My new lab is almost directly across from my old boss' office, with the amusing result that I now see him much more often than when he actually was my boss. (Also, it surprises me just what a small percentage of the time he's actually in his office. It always surprised me when I went to his office and he wasn't there, but apparently that's just par for the course. I suppose particle physicists are very often not around, since they're often visiting, or at least videoconferencing with, a remote site.)

Behold the power of the Internet
So I was just engaging in some ego-surfing the other day, and was pleased to note that I have now achieved almost total domination of the top 50 or so hits (I don't remember exactly at which point I got bored, but it couldn't have been too far). What surprised the heck out of me was just how many of those hits came from this piece I wrote about ants infesting my hub. It kind of makes me wish I had crafted it a little better to withstand the ravages of posterity, but I'm still amused at just how much it got forwarded around.

Sosa update
So, apparently, the 76 of Sosa's bats that were confiscated after the game were tested and found to be clean. I find this a tremendous relief, not just because it makes sense (after all, if Sosa had more corked bats, you'd think that one of them would be noticed earlier) but because it raises my hopes that it won't end up tainting his whole legacy. It's possible that Sosa's explanation was legitimate; or perhaps, as I've seen suggested, he was just depressed by his slump and resorted to desperate measures, but either way, I'm hopeful that this was just a short-term thing.

Depressing link of the day
So, apparently, the average Ford of today has a worse fuel economy than the Model T of nearly a hundred years ago. Of course, Ford defends itself by pointing out that they can make more fuel-efficient cars (and some are indeed quite impressive), but the fact that the poor fuel efficiency is driven by marketing, rather than technology, is in itself more than a little bit depressing.

Scandal of the day
So, apparently, Sammy Sosa was caught using a corked bat.

Despite the fact that I've never been the biggest of Sosa fans (still bitter from his 1998 MVP win, I suppose), I really do hope he turns out to be innocent. His explanation is certainly plausible enough (though maybe that's just because I want to believe it), but who really knows? I guess they're going to look at the rest of his bats which they impounded, and hopefully they won't find anything more incriminating.

The question of just how beneficial the cork is is, of course, another matter. The physicists claim that cork provides a negligible benefit to the actual power you can impart to the ball, but it's of course quite difficult to measure the impact of a lighter bat in a game setting. And the sample size for corked bats being used in MLB is quite small (well, at least that we know of -- I have no doubt that it's noticeably higher than has been measured so far). Norm Cash produced arguably the greatest fluke season in baseball history (I'll bet even the most baseball illiterate fan can find it on that page) with what he later admitted was a corked bat; on the other hand, it didn't seem to help Wilton Guerrero much. Albert Belle certainly hit fine after his big corking scandal, though if Omar Vizquel is to be believed that's because all of his bats were corked. The other cases I don't know enough about to say anything useful, but it sure seems like the evidence is inconclusive.

In light of this, I guess I'm just disappointed that a player like Sosa -- who I think everyone can agree doesn't need cork to hit the occasional ball out of the park -- risked tarnishing his reputation (which, sadly, has pretty much irreversibly happened now) by trying this, even if his intentions were the best, as he claims.

Simpsons Quiz of the Day
Simpsons characters sure are a thankful bunch. Identify the source of each of these quotes (speaker and context):
1. "Thank you very much, State Supreme Court."
2. "Thank you very much, Warren Christopher."
3. "You're screwed, thank you, bye."
4. "Ja, thank you, ja, that's nice."
5. "Oh, thank you, kind innkeeper."
6. "Thank you, NASA."
7. "Thank you, door!"
8. "Thanks a lot, Steve!"
9. "Thank you! You have fulfilled our dreams and the dreams of our ancestors!"
10. "Thanks a lot! Now *I* look crazy!"

You can email answers to me, or just post them in the comments. Enjoy! Answers later.

Rant of the day
After working with code on physics projects for three summers now, I've come to a very simple conclusion: 95% of all physicists can't write good code to save their life. This is undoubtedly because they're just unfamiliar with the rules of good programming, so they tend to be extremely overly cautious in some areas and just plain sloppy in others. Physicist coding seems to follow a few simple rules, enumerated below. (All rants apply to C code. I could rant about the Fortran code too, but I think its mere existence is really all I need to say on that front.)

1) The purpose of -Wall is to produce all those pretty warnings. That gives you an impressive feeling of just how long your program is. (Seriously. I don't think I've ever compiled another person's code with -Wall which didn't produce at least two screenfuls of warnings. This is true even when their own makefile included -Wall.)

2) All functions must be declared "int", but if you don't really need to return anything, then don't bother with those pesky return() statements! Conversely, when calling a function that returns a value, you must always carefully save that value, even if you have absolutely no plans to ever do anything with it.

3) Code should never actually be deleted. If you need to take out a particular piece of code, always comment it out. After all, even if the old code is flagrantly wrong or outdated, you'll never know when you might need it again!

4) Loop variables should be given descriptive names such as "loopvar", thus freeing up the precious single-letter variable names for more important variables. The capital single-letter variables are used for strings, of course.

5) Comments of the form
i += 2; /* adds 2 to i */
are perfectly reasonable. Under no circumstance should a comment attempt to explain why one might want to add 2 to i, however.

6) Function prototypes should be strewn throughout the source file, preferably right in front of the function that needs to use the prototyped functions. Under no circumstances should they be placed in a header. Similarly, one never needs to include the header files for library functions -- the compiler knows what they are, right?

7) A char array that you're planning to use as a string should be as big as the number of characters in the string. (My favorite!)

8) The word "const" does not exist. (This might seem like a petty gripe. It's just that I always cringe when I see declarations like
char *filename = "some hardcoded filename";
and not just because of what's on the right side of that assignment.)

9) It's perfectly okay to name an ordinary variable LIKE_THIS, as long as you don't really plan on changing it. Similarly, a #define'd value you might want to name like_this, in case you want to change the value later.

10) Indentation, placement of braces, and so forth should be done as inconsistently as possible. To ensure the best possible performance in this area, maximize the number of people, each with their own programming style, working on a single source file.

11) Source code management does not exist. As per (10) above, have as many people as possible working on a single file at once. However, should you need to branch the code, make as many copies of the original source code as you need for each situation you might have to deal with and modify each one independently.

I'm sure I'll think of more items to add to this list as time goes on.

Much ado about QuesTec
For those of you non-baseball-followers reading this, you probably haven't heard much about QuesTec. (Those of you who have can skip this paragraph.) QuesTec is a system introduced by baseball last year, which uses computers to judge balls and strikes. Umpires who don't agree with the computer's calls at least 90% of the time can be disciplined by MLB. Needless to say, the umpires are hopping mad about this; perhaps slightly more surprisingly, the pitchers are equally irate. Curt Schilling, angry after a poor start, destroyed a QuesTec camera (in a karmic retribution thingy, he later broke his hand), and several members of the Braves also expressed unhappiness with the system after blowing a lead.

Perhaps much less surprisingly, the pitchers who were complaining were pitchers who did badly; I certainly haven't heard a pitcher who pitched a good game saying the first thing about QuesTec (nor, for that matters, have I seen any comment from the hitters). And this is pretty much human nature -- after all, a pitcher will naturally look for a scapegoat, and the QuesTec system is an obvious target -- a nice inanimate object to take out your frustrations on. Pitchers destroying hapless water coolers have been a fixture of baseball for years; why shouldn't QuesTec, which in a pitcher's mind can easily be responsible, be any different? And as Schilling himself admitted, his opposing counterpart on his day of destruction was pitching a two-hitter, so it's hard to argue that he was suddenly terribly hurt by QuesTec.

I don't mean to say that QuesTec is perfect, but I have to ultimately side with this quote from Sandy Alderson: "What this is about is Curt Schilling wanting pitches that are balls, called strikes... If that's what he wants, he should go to the rules committee. Otherwise, he should stop whining and go about his business."

Names
I have this weird paranoia about people's names -- I'm always afraid that I'll call someone I don't know all that well by the wrong name, and they'll think I'm a complete flake. This manifests itself especially strongly with my students; I usually pick up most of their names pretty quickly, but I'm extremely hesitant to actually use them. When I hand back labs or quizzes for the first time, I always have this fear that I'll give the wrong one back to somebody and they'll look at me disapprovingly, and even after that goes successfully (as it always has) I still feel wary.

The other day at LBL, I saw one of my former students. I remembered his name immediately (he was one of the more memorable people in the section), but I still didn't actually get around to using it. It's all very silly, I know, but I wish I could break myself of this habit.

I have the bestest timing ever
So I began work today. Work definitely looks like it's going to keep me busy for the near future, and my need to be productive means I'm not likely to be doing extensive blogging from there, either. So I may have to scale back my grand plans. Fortunately, they weren't actually that grand in the first place.

Forgiveness vs. responsibility for one's own actions
So I was just reading this article, "The Virtue of Hate". It argues that the main difference between Christianity and Judaism (aside from the whole Jesus issue, of course) is that Christianity belives that any sinner, no matter how awful, can ultimately be forgiven and redeemed if they accept Jesus, while Judaism believes that people should and must be punished appropriately for their misdeeds.

The article itself is very interesting, but I also find it fascinating that the Right (which tends to be Christian) tends to espouse the latter view, while the Left (which probably has the majority of Jews, and certainly has the majority of non-religious people) is much more strongly on the "forgiveness" side of the fence.

I'm not making any promises...
Before, I tried to make a conscious effort not to let my posts be just links to interesting things. There was no real rational reason behind this; it was mostly just a desire to be different for no particular reason (there's that perfectionist impulse kicking in again; if you want a reason why it took me so long to finally punt the offending post and get things started again, you need look no further).

Anyway, I think that it's probably more interesting to have a post which contains only a link to an interesting thing than no post at all (and hopefully you agree; if not, well, feel free to disagree!) So I'll probably be attempting to increase the quantity of content at least somewhat via this method.

A completely useless announcement
So this weekend we're hosting BANG 3, a puzzle hunt. BANG is pretty low-key, at least compared to ridiculous extravaganzas like The Game, which probably require months of planning, thousands of dollars of expenditures, and a cast of dozens if not hundreds. Ours is just a little simpler -- and cheaper -- but I'm still quite excited about it. All of this activity and effort I've been putting into it makes me regret the fact that I missed the couple of opportunities to go hunting this last semester -- a combination of too busy, too expensive, and too little interest from teammates -- but on the other hand it looks like there'll still be fun stuff this summer.

Catching up...the short version
So it's summer already -- my favorite season of the year, as I will generally tell anyone within earshot. Often mid-spring (early April or so, before final stress begins to weigh in) will compete for these honors, but this year the weather was really quite unimpressive up until about the beginning of May, so summer is the clear favorite for this year, barring meteor strike or somesuch.

Anyway, Mike's graduating, I'm moving on to a new research group (and very much looking forward to it), and I'm probably happier than I've been in quite a while. This is a good thing, I suppose, though I do wish I was a little closer to graduation myself.

Bet you weren't expecting this
All right, I've decided that it's time to brush the dust off of this thing and get to writing again. If you're wondering why the extremely long delay, it's because I got about halfway through the next installment of Sports Philosophy, got bogged down, and then never actually got around to finishing it, and then just kind of let things lapse, as you probably were able to figure out.

Anyway, for obvious reasons, I'm going to not announce a proud resurrection quite yet. If they're not obvious, it's because (a) if this burst of energy turns out to be fleeting, I don't really want to look like an idiot, and (b) it's more fun for me to tell people that this is back once I have 10-15 posts up to read, rather than just this one post telling you that this is back. Or maybe you'll just see this by accident and it'll be a pleasant surprise.

On comfort reading
A sure sign that I'm feeling in better-than-normal condition is when I get around to actually reading things. Normally, reading is one of those activities that I keep meaning to get around to but rarely actually do, since I always feel that I have work I should be doing instead of lazing around with a book. So when I can actually get myself to sit down and curl up with a good book, it makes me happy.

Of course, in these times I don't always have new things to read lying around, so often I'll find myself looking on my bookshelf. Peculiarly enough, this more often than not leads me to Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos books. I first was recommended to the series on rasfwr-j (that's rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan for those of you not familiar with the acronym -- yes, I did read Robert Jordan once -- no, I don't see why that's relevant to my past -- can we please stop asking questions about that now?), and darned if I can remember who it was (Kate Nepveu, maybe?) who said that they were good comfort reading. And it's really true -- they're light enough that they're a pleasure to read, Brust has a delightful writing style, and the plot is sufficient to keep me entertained even though I know how it's all going to end. All in all, the perfect combination for something to read when I just want a nice break from the rest of the world.

(Whee, I sound like a back-of-the-book blurb.)

Sports Philosophy II
(Part 1 of a 3-part series, time permitting)

Ultimately, the goal of any sport is to determine who the best team is. Now, of course, the question of what the "best" team is a difficult philosophical nut to crack in the first place, and often you'll see heated arguments on this subject when the participants don't even agree on the fundamental goals they're trying to prove. So I'll try to tackle the question of what makes a better team from several different angles. In the scientist's way, I'll start out with a deliberately simplified model.

Consider three teams (which, for lack of imagination, I'll call A, B, and C). They play a round robin, at the end of which each team is 1-1. This is the classic Circle of Death you'll see in quizbowl tournaments all the time. To make the example a little more fleshed-out, add, say, five more teams which always lose to A, B, and C, so we have a eight-team division with three teams at 6-1 and three teams at 2-5. Now, let's make an assumption that these results fairly reflect the quality of the three teams. This is arguably not a safe assumption, but we're not going to get interesting results without dong something, so we'll make it. And I can certainly think of quizbowl tournaments where this would be an accurate thing to say. Okay, now it's pretty obvious that we can say that A, B, and C are of the same intrinsic quality (assuming that it's meaningful to speak of an "intrinsic quality" in the first place; again, without making this assumption we're not going to get very far, so I'm just going to say it and move on).

Now, let's conduct a little gedanken experiment. Suppose team C's bus gets stuck in snow, or they forfeit all of their games due to their star player accepting throwback jerseys, or something else happens to take them out of the picture. All of a sudden, we have a pretty surprising result: team A is now 6-0 and team B is 5-1, so pretty much anyone sane would say that team A has done better than team B, despite the fact that our assumption that their intrinsic qualities are the same still holds.

All right, this might seem a little excessively contrived, but let's add another little wrench into the gedanken experiment. Let's say team A suffers a loss to team F somewhere along the line, so now team A and B are both 5-1. Now, we've made team A worse than its previous baseline, so if our previous assumption still holds true (and I sure haven't done anything to change it), then team B's intrinsic ability is actually a little better than team A. And yet, based on the fact that team A has beaten team B head-to-head, you'd see most people agree that team A is the better one.

At this point, I suppose you're going to say that this experiment is arguably a little silly. And so it is -- after all, just because our mythical team C exists in this case doesn't mean that we can always add a mythical team C to any given setup like the one above. Nevertheless, I think this serves to illustrate a broader point: many people, given two teams with equal records, will value a "good" win over a "bad" win, especially in the case of a head-to-head tiebreaker. But the team who loses the head-to-head tiebreaker has suffered a "better" loss than the other team, by definition. Why should we believe there's any a priori reason that a "good" win plus a "bad" loss is somehow indicative of a stronger team quality than a "bad" win plus a "good" loss?

This is not to say I oppose looking at indicators like strength of schedule -- in fact, I think it's something all-too-frequently overlooked (I'll talk about this more in the next part). But unfortunately, a lot of the time, strength of schedule is used by boosters of a particular team who will say things like, "Well, our team beat X, Y, and Z, and they're all good teams, so that must mean they're good!" while completely overlooking that the team also lost to J, K, and L, which were pretty bad teams. There are two sides to every coin, and if a good win is accompanied by a bad loss, then there's no basis to judge it better than a good loss and a bad win (in the absence of other information, of course). Trying to get further rankings out of this basis is merely trying to get something from nothing, and is essentially circular reasoning.

In the next part, I'll try to actually accomplish something productive.