Leonard Richardson's Blog, page 15

Poems of SCIENCE! I Mean, Science

I picked up a cheap old poetry anthology called Poems of Science, figuring there'd be some good stuff. And... there was, but I had wait for the modern conception of "science" to come about, and then spot poetry about a hundred years to come to grips with it, and decide that science is interesting and not going to go away. By that time I was more than halfway through the anthology. But around the late nineteenth century some excellent poetry starts happening, and I thought I'd share a couple links.

Miroslav Holub's Zito the Magician and Robert Browning's much longer An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician are really great and work as spec-fic stories. Swinburne's Hertha is this weird humanist we-are-made-of-star-stuff mythology that's what you'd expect from Swinburne. And then there's "Cosmic Gall", a goofy poem by John Updike which I'm gonna quote in full because it's the only thing of John Updike's I've read and liked.

Cosmic Gall

John Updike

Neutrinos, they are very small.

They have no charge and have no mass

And do not interact at all.

The earth is just a silly ball

To them, through which they simply pass,

Like dustmaids down a drafty hall

Or photons through a sheet of glass.

They snub the most exquisite gas,

Ignore the most substantial wall,

Cold shoulder steel and sounding brass,

Insult the stallion in his stall,

And, scorning barriers of class,

Infiltrate you and me. Like tall

And painless guillotines they fall

Down through our heads into the grass.

At night, they enter at Nepal

And pierce the lover and his lass

From underneath the bed—you call

It wonderful; I call it crass.

The Ghost of Ghostbusters Past

Just a quick semi-technical post on how I made @WeBustedGhosts, my new bot that casts movies from an alternate history where "ghostbusters" is a stock comedy genre, sort of a twentieth-century commedia dell'arte. In particular, I did a lot of work with IMDB data that I want to record for your benefit (and by you, I mean future me).

The bot was inspired by two things: first, this video by Ivan Guerrero which "premakes" Ghostbusters as a 1954 comedy starring Bob Hope, Fred MacMurray, and Martin/Lewis. Second, the reaction of fools to the fact that women comedians will bust ghosts in the upcoming Ghostbusters remake. More specifically, Kris's endless mockery of the idea that "ghostbuster" is a job with a legitimate gender qualification.

These things got me thinking about the minimal set of things you need to make Ghostbusters. You need the idea of combining a horror movie with a comedy about starting a business. Someone could have come up with that idea in the silent film era. You need a director and four actors who can do comedy. And all those people need to be alive and working at the same time, because ghosts aren't real... OR ARE THEY? Either way, you can describe a point in Ghostbusters space with six pieces of information: four actors, a director, and a year. That's small enough to fit into a tweet, so I made a Twitter bot.

Our journey to botdom starts, as you might expect, with an IMDB data dump. I've dealt with IMDB data before and this time I was excited to learn about IMDbPY, which promised to get a handle on the ancient and not-terribly-consistent flat-file IMDB data format. Unfortunately IMDbPY is designed for looking up facts about specific movies, not for reasoning over the set of all movies. However, it does have a great script called imdbpy2sql.py, which will take the flat-file format and turn it into a SQL database.

There will be SQL in this discussion (because I want to show you/future me how to do semi-complex stuff with the database created by IMDbPY), but unless you're future me, you can skip it. Basically, for each actor in IMDB, I need to calculate that actor's tendency to get high billing in popular comedies for a given year. They don't have to be good comedies, or Ghostbusters-like comedies, they just have to have a lot of IMDB ratings.

I also want to figure out each actor's effective comedy lifespan. If an actor stops doing popular comedy or dies or retires, they should stop showing up in the dataset. If a dramatic actor branches out into comedy they should show up in the dataset as of their first comedic performance. Basically, if you learned that this actor starred in a comedy that came out in a certain year, it shouldn't be a big surprise.

Orson Wells would be great in a Ghostbusters movie, but he never did comedy, so he's not in the dataset. How about... Cameron Diaz? She rarely gets top billing, but she has second or third billing in a lot of very popular comedies. For a year like 1997 she tops the list of potential women Ghostbusters.

How about... Peter Falk? His first comedy role was in 1961's Pocket Full of Miracles, his last in 2005's Checking Out. His acting career stretches from 1957 to 2009, but he's only a potential Ghostbuster between 1961 and 2005. He won't get chosen very often, because he's not primarily known for comedy (i.e. his comedies aren't as popular as other peoples'), but it will happen occasionally.

That's the data I extracted. Not "how famous is this actor" but "how much would you expect this actor to be in a comedy in a given year".

The IMDbPY database is more complicated than I like to deal with, so my strategy was to use SQL get a big table of roles and then process it with Python. Here's SQL to get every major role in a comedy that has more than 1000 votes on IMDB:

select title.title, title.production_year, movie_info_idx.info, name.name, name.gender, cast_info.nr_order, kind_id from title join cast_info on title.id=cast_info.movie_id join name on cast_info.person_id=name.id join movie_info_idx on movie_info_idx.movie_id=title.id join movie_info on movie_info.movie_id=title.id where cast_info.role_id in (1,2) and kind_id in (1,3,4) and movie_info.info_type_id=3 and movie_info.info='Comedy' and cast(movie_info_idx.info as integer) > 1000 and movie_info_idx.info_type_id=100 and cast_info.nr_order

Some explanation of numbers and IDs:


movie_info_idx.info_type_id=100 means the join against the movie_info_idx table is looking up the number of votes (id #100 in my info_type table).
cast(movie_info_idx.info as integer) > 1000 means that the number of votes has to be more than 1000.
cast_info.role_id in (1,2) means I'm only considering "actor" and "actress" roles (IDs 1 and 2 in my role_type table). I'm not considering directors, writers, etc.
movie_info.info_type_id=3 means that I'm looking up the genre of the movie ("genre" is ID 3 in my info_type table). Then I use movie_info.info='Comedy' to restrict to 'Comedy'.
kind_id in (1,3,4) means I'm only considering "movie", "tv movie" and "video movie" (items 1, 3, and 4 in my kind_type table) I'm not considering television, video games, etc.
cast_info.nr_order means I'm only considering the top seven billed actors for each movie.

I run this on a SQLite database and the output looks like:


#1 Cheerleader Camp|2010|2297|Cassell, Seth|m|2|4
...

So the title of the movie is "#1 Cheerleader Camp", it came out in 2010, it has 2297 votes, and Seth Cassell (a man) was an actor in that movie and got fourth billing.

Why didn't I include television in this query? Because television on IMDB is really complicated. See, actors aren't credited to television shows; they're credited to individual episodes. But nobody rates individual episodes; they rate the show as a whole. So I had to do a separate query to determine who the top actors were on each comedy television show, and then divide up that show's votes between the four top actors. Otherwise actors whose primary comedy career is in television won't get their due.

Here's SQL to get all the roles in TV episodes:

select tv_show.title, episode.title, episode.production_year, votes.info, name.name, name.gender, cast_info.nr_order from title as tv_show join title as episode on tv_show.id=episode.episode_of_id join cast_info on episode.id=cast_info.movie_id join name on cast_info.person_id=name.id join movie_info_idx as votes on votes.movie_id=tv_show.id join movie_info on movie_info.movie_id=tv_show.id where cast_info.role_id in (1,2) and tv_show.kind_id in (2,5) and episode.kind_id=7 and movie_info.info_type_id=3 and movie_info.info='Comedy' and cast(votes.info as integer) > 10000 and votes.info_type_id=100 and cast_info.nr_order < 5;

This is pretty similar to the last query but some of the IDs are different.


tv_show.kind_id in (2,5) means the show "tv series" and "tv mini series", IDs 2 and 5 from my kind_type table.
episode.kind_id=7 is "episode". I'm joining the title table against itself, the first time as "tv_show" and the second time as "episode". The votes come from "tv_show" and the roles come from "episode".

I run this and the output looks like:


'Allo 'Allo!|A Bun in the Oven|1991|14022|Kaye, Gorden|m|1
...

This means there's an 'Allo 'Allo! episode called "A Bun in the Oven", the episode came out in 1991, 'Allo 'Allo (NOT this specific episode) has 14,022 votes, and Gorden Kaye got top billing for this episode.

I got this data out of a database as quickly as possible and bashed at it to make a TV show look like a movie with four actors--the four actors who appeared in the most episodes of the TV show.

Directors were pretty similar to film actors. for each director who's ever worked in comedy, I measured their tendency towards putting out a popular comedy in any given year. There's a very strong power law here, with a few modern directors overshadowing their contemporaries, and Charlie Chaplin completely obliterating all his contemporaries.

Here's SQL to get all comedies with their directors:

select title.title, title.production_year, movie_info_idx.info, name.name, name.gender from title join cast_info on title.id=cast_info.movie_id join name on cast_info.person_id=name.id join movie_info_idx on movie_info_idx.movie_id=title.id join movie_info on movie_info.movie_id=title.id where cast_info.role_id in (8) and kind_id in (1,3,4) and movie_info.info_type_id=3 and movie_info.info='Comedy' and cast(movie_info_idx.info as integer) > 5000 and movie_info_idx.info_type_id=100;

The only new number here is cast_info.role_id in (8), which means I'm now picking up directors instead of actors.

At this point I was done with the SQL database. I wrote the "Ghostbusters casting office". It chooses a year, picks a cast and a director for that year, and then (15% of the time) it picks a custom title. My stupidly hilarious technique for custom titles is to choose the name of an actual comedy from the given year and replace one of the nouns with "Ghost" or "Ghostbuster". So far this has led to films like "Don't Drink the Ghost" and (I swear this happened during testing) "Ghostbuster Dad".

Here's how I pick a cast for a given year: I line up all the actors for that year by my calculated variable "tendency towards being a Ghostbuster", and then I use random.expovariate to choose from different places near the front of the list (to bias the output towards actors you won't have to look up). This is the same trick I use for

More Dice Fun

A while back I wrote about a maddening but interesting book called Scarne on Dice . It's a really huge book which I intend to get rid of ASAP, but before I do there's a couple things about dice, and cheating at dice, I wanted to quote.

In perhaps the most entertaining section of the book Scarne takes on the sleaziest parties in this whole wretched business, "the crooked gambling supply houses", who sell outdated cheating devices at huge markups.

According to The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man, another book I read recently, the mailing lists of these supply houses were coveted by con artists, because by definition, everyone on those lists "liked the best of it." One catalog's advice to buyers, according to HoyleScarne:

When telegraphing use the following code: PAINT for cards and CUBE for dice.

I feel like this led to a lot of telegrams like "DESIRE FIVE PAIR LOADED CUBE AND TWO DECKS MARKED PAINT FOR CHEATING AT CUBE AND PAINT STOP."

This head-slapping entry from Scarne's inventory of trick dice needs to be quoted in full:

DOOR POPS

These are a very brazen brand of mis-spotted dice that show 7 or 11 every roll. Since the catalog lists them, there apparently are buyers, but they are strictly for use on very soft marks and then only on dark nights. One die bears only the numbers 6 and 2; the other nothing but 5's! Since anyone but a blind man would tag these cubes as mis-spots, the moment they rolled out, they are of no use except for night play under an overhead light when the chumps can't see anything but the top surfaces of the dice. Strictly for use by cheats who don't know what a real set of Tops is.

There's a a couple entertaining but long stories of specific cheats which I won't transcribe. The best is the story of "the mouth switch". Seems there was a craps hustler in the 30s who kept a trick die in his mouth and introduced into the game it by cupping the dice in his hands and "blowing" on them. They called him "Mononucleosis Joe". Actually they called him "The Spitter," but they only started calling him that after he tried this trick while drunk and ended up rolling all three dice onto the craps table.

Finally, a tale of collegiality which I feel gets really boring if you explain what the numbers mean:

Several years ago the Harvard Computation Laboratory put a battery of calculating machines to work and came up with a whole book full of answers. Since the binomial formula is used in many problems and so often requires staggering amounts of arithmetic, they constructed a set of Cumulative Binomial Probability Distribution Tables which give provability fractions for a wide range of values of n, r, and P. And because Dr. Frederick Mosteller, Chairman of the Department of Statistics, had seen a copy of Scarne on Dice and was aware of the 26 game problem, he saw to it that the calculating machienes were asked to provide figures for the terms n = 130 and P = 1/6.

It's easy to read this book and feel superior to the people who get fooled by seemingly rudimentary tricks (David Maurer, author of The Big Con, specifically points this out in his book), but I'm sure someone who knew their stuff could take my entire roll in a crooked dice game. Why am I so sure? Because you could take my entire roll in a completely fair dice game.

The Crummy.com Review of Things 2014

Another year, another blog post summing it up. Here's 2013. And here's 2014:

Creations

2014's big project was The Minecraft Archive project, which led into
The Minecraft Geologic Survey, which led into the Reef series and two huge bots. I'm planning on doing a refresh of the data this year to get maps created in 2014--hopefully it'll be easier the second time.

I also finished Situation Normal, edited it and have now sent it out to editors and agents. I'm cautiously optimistic. I finished two short stories, "The Process Repeats" and "The Barrel of Yuks Rule", and like many of my stories they're a rewrite away from being sellable and who knows when I'll get the time.

I gave a talk on bots at Foolscap and a talk on improving Project Gutenberg metadata at Books in Browsers. That ties into my job at NYPL. I had a full-time job for most of this year, for the first time in a while, and 2015 is the year you'll get to use what I'm making.

Subcategory: Bots. You won't believe how many autonomous agents I created in 2014! I'm not even going to show you all of them, only the ones I'm really proud of. I'm going to order them by how much I like them, but I'll also include their current Twitter follower count--the only measurement that really matters in this post-apocalyptic world.


Minecraft Signs (832)
Serial Entrepreneur (44)
Minecraft Ebooks (134)
Hapax Hegemon (143)
The Bot of Mormon (31)
(50)
Euphemism Bot (70)

My secret goal for 2014 was to have a bot whose follower count was greater than my own. Minecraft Signs (probably my favorite bot of all time) came close but didn't quite make it.

I also created a bot that's so annoying I didn't release it. Maybe this year.

Film

I scaled back my film watching versus 2013, but still saw about fifty features. Here's my 2014 must-watch list. As always, only films I saw for the first time are eligible for this prestigeless nonor.


Pom Poko (1994)
Alien (1979)
My Love Has Been Burning (1949)
Seven Chances (1925)
A Town Called Panic (2009)
Alphaville (1965)
Frozen (2013)
The King of Comedy (1982)
Playtime (1967)
The Women (1939)

These are more or less the films I would watch again (a very high bar to clear), although The King of Comedy should be watched once and only once. I'm kind of surprised that Playtime got on here since I wasn't wild about it, but I really can see how it'll be better the second time.

The runners-up: films I recommend, but will probably not see again, and if you're like "aah, it's three hours long" or "aah, David Bowie alien penis", I'll understand:


Solaris (1972)
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
Queen Christina (1933)
Paprika (2006)

Literature

Didn't read a lot of books this year, but I made them count. The Crummy.com Books of the Year are Dispatches, Michael Herr's Vietnam reporting memoir, and Phil Lapsley's phone-phreak history Exploding the Phone, which covers about the same time period. Both awesome.

Sumana and I selected Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Lucky Strike" for a Strange Horizons reprint. It's a great story.

Audio

Since I started commuting again it was a decent year for discovering new podcasts. Sumana and I love Just One More Thing, a deep-dive Columbo podcast. I also really like Omega Tau, a podcast that will do a two-part series on shipping container logistics, or a five-parter on the hardware and operation of the space shuttle. Honorable mention to the guilty pleasure-ish Laser Time, which is more or less random nostalgia but which brings out a lot of interesting deep cuts.

Games

Didn't play a lot of video games because a) Minecraft Archive Project took up all the time I used to spend playing Minecraft, and b) my desktop developed a weird problem where it abruptly powers off if I stress it too much, e.g. by playing a modern computer game. I should really address this problem, but I have not, because it does prevent me from spending too much time on games.

Played a lot of board games with friends as usual. The Crummy.com Board Game of the Year is 2014's The Castles of Mad King Ludwig, a building game that captures the true thrill of interior design. Runner-up: Hanabi, the cooperative game that magically turns passive-agressiveness into an asset that benefits all. Dishonorable mention to 1989's Sniglets, a party game where having fun requires not that you disregard the scoring system (a common thing for party games) but that you deliberately play to lose.

That reminds me, I should have mentioned in 2014's review of 2013 that Encore is a party game from 1989 that's really, really good. You have to have the right group though.

That's it! How we doin' in 2015? I'm getting a lot done. In fact I just wrote this big blog post talking about the best of 2014... oh, but you're probably not interested. See ya!

December Film Roundup, And Top Ten

And in this corner... Film Roundup!



The Big Kahuna (1994): Saw this in November with Sumana but forgot to review it. Now it's December and I don't have much to say about it. I liked it fine, good performances, just not much to say.

Pom Poko (1994): You know I like a movie like Godzilla that takes a really silly idea and treats it with the seriousness it would deserve if that stuff was really happening. This movie is the opposite: it treats a deadly serious topic (anti-colonial resistance) in the silliest way imaginable. I can't think of another movie like this. It's not a "dark comedy" because in a "dark comedy" a lot of the humor is awkward, derived from situational irony and the audience's distance from the suffering characters. In Pom Poko you totally empathize with the tanuki, all their arguments and compromises and weaknesses; but the whole movie they're goofing off, all their plans are slapstick, etc. There's even a little chibi-meter on each character that tells you how silly that character is being right now. (A Pynchon-esque touch, if I may say so.) I love it. Crummy.com Film of the Year.

IMDB says: "The English dubbed version censors all references to testicles." That explains why the English dubbed version is only twelve minutes long.

A Town Called Panic (2009): a.k.a. "Panique au Village". It was like living in a town of panic... I just wanted out of that town. This movie goes into the other quadrant that I like: it treats a really silly idea (Gumby, basically) in a really silly way. It's old-timey injected-plastic childrens' toys in a ridiculous stop-motion comedy that has enough Belgian surrealism cred to be a hit with the festival crowd. It's the feature-film extension of a bunch of Belgian TV shorts, and you can watch the shorts online. High-school French is enough to understand them. Or even no French, it's almost all sight gags.

Anyway, love this movie. Total rave. Except I'm a little uncomfortable with the cowboy-and-Indian thing. (The main character-toys are Horse, Cowboy, and Indian.) I wouldn't say there's any offensive content or even any subtext here. The relationship between Cowboy and Indian is basically the relationship between Crow and Tom Servo, and the connotations of these particular roles are completely ignored except that Cowboy has a rifle and Indian has a bow-and-arrow and Horse is a horse. And they're childrens' toys and this isn't even an American film so it's doubly removed from real-world history. But I gotta judge this movie by 2009 standards, and I think there's a reason why Toy Story has Cowboy and Horse but not Indian. They didn't want to go there. And that's not really honest either, so I guess I'm saying it's... problematic.

The Love of a Woman (1953): a.k.a. "L'amour d'une femme," speaking of high-school French. Sort of like Lady Oyu in that everyone would be a lot happier if they could just let go of their culturally-constructed hangups. But Lady Oyu felt like nothing changed the whole way through whereas the stasis in this movie is achieved by a shifting equilibrium.

I feel like this movie was filmed in the same seaside town as Lola, but I wouldn't place a big bet on that assertion.

Hot Fuzz (2007): Feel-good rewatch with Sumana. It's still great, but upon rewatching it I want to take back what I said in 2013 and say that I think The World's End is the best of the Cornetto Trilogy. There are a lot of confounding variables: maybe these movies play much better on the big screen or maybe they're always a little worse the second time through. But the reason I say this now is that The World's End does a better job introducing the fantastic element. You expect people to die in a cop action movie, so the fact that there's something really weird about the deaths in Hot Fuzz doesn't become clear until pretty late in the movie. Whereas the first time The World's End gets violent you know something's going on.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014) I hoped against hope that my ticket stub would say "HOBBIT 3", but it just said "Hobbit". I did however take this picture of a motto suitable for putting on mugs and selling throughout Middle-Earth:

This movie was 100% adequate and satisfied my desire for a Hobbit movie to watch with Susanna. My main complaint (and I think this can apply to the second movie as well) is there's way too much of a focus on hand-to-hand combat. The hand-to-hand set pieces in LoTR worked and were true to the book, but The Hobbit is all about the triumph of cunning over brute force, and although there was a lot of cunning on display, it wasn't 150 minutes worth or however long this movie was. Cut the hand-to-hand combat from all three movies and you've got two super fun movies, which (my final verdict) was what they should have made in the first place.

One advantage of the Hobbit series over LoTR is, the ending was properly dramatized. The only time I was really happy to be watching Five Armies (as opposed to satisfied) was when Lobelia Sackville-Baggins showed up. And that made me realize that what I want from Tolkien dramatizations isn't big battles, it's, like, Real Housewives of the Shire. I love Bilbo's goodbye party in LoTR, how it's his one passive-aggressive opportunity to strike back against a community that still resents him for having gone off on an adventure and come back.

I saw a ton of animated movies over Christmas with my niblings, but I don't want to give them full reviews since I saw little snippets of the movies as I dashed around helping my sister make dinner and dealing with household emergencies, rather than my admittedly snooty technique of sitting down and watching the whole movie. So I'll just rank them from "really good" to "awful":


Frozen (2013)
The Little Mermaid (1989)
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Tangled (2010)
The Sword in the Stone (1963)
Despicable Me 2 (2013)
It's Christmastime Again, Charlie Brown (1992)
Santa Claus is Comin' to Town (1970)


These aren't movies at all, but as long as I'm ranking Disney things, over Christmas we also went to Disney California Adventure ("It's everything Walt Disney hated, turned into a Disney theme park."—Susanna), so I thought I'd rank the rides we went on, on the same "really good" to "awful" scale:


California Screamin' (also my niece's favorite)
Toy Story Midway Mania!
Animation Academy (would be higher, but I wasn't a big fan of the way Disney sued us all for copyright infringement as we left)
Soarin' Over California
Radiator Springs Racers
Mickey's Fun Wheel
Goofy's Sky School
Ariel's Undersea Adventure

The last time I went to Disney-anything was in high school, and I could do a whole post about how weird it is to be in one of these things with a general knowledge of design and semiotics and the ability to see how it works, but I believe this ground has been well-covered elsewhere. So I'll just mention that during Ariel's Undersea Adventure I found myself thinking "Man, this must be the worst job in the park, sitting there in a Prince Eric outfit all day waving... wait, they're not sentient."

And I'll close this section with words of wisdom from a random kid my nephew instantly made friends with while in line for a rope swing, and then immediately forgot about post-rope swing: "Do you know why they call it Disneyland? Because it's Disney, and you're in a LAND!"

The Ref (1994): Fun Christmas-noir movie seen with Sumana on her recommendation. Sumana is a big Kevin Spacey fan from way back and I'm pretty sure the first time I ever saw him was on Broadway in 2007, but I've come around. (See The Big Kahuna passim.) More personal than The Ice Harvest and really getting into the mechanics of dysfunctional relationships. I really liked the main plotline, was indifferent to the bumbling-cops B-plot and the Santa C-plot, didn't like the third act's abrupt twist into "heartwarming" territory. Overall, a good movie with a great title.

Paprika (2006): Probably would have blown me away, except I was already away from Pom Poko, a much better movie with over-the-top visuals that are nearly as wild. It's still good, it's got a decent critique going, at its best its spectable is superb and totally original where Pom Poko takes everything from folklore. But it's literally got a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (part of the critique?) and if it has any guerilla tanuki they're way in the back. So, just "good".

Conceptual Crossovers

Over my Christmas break I read Glen David Gold's Sunnyside, a great novel, a little literary for my taste, but really solid. It's one of those novels with interweaving plots, and Charlie Chaplin is the main character of one of the strands. Around the middle of the book, Chaplin is at a rally in San Francisco, giving a speech trying to sell government bonds for WWI. His rhetoric starts to falter, and we go from a transcript of the speech into a pretty believable interior monologue:

He felt abandoned. He hated the war. He hated that the country was in
it, that there was no place to go but forward, that more atrocities
were to come. He felt people were never intentionally beastly or
malicious, but they were pompous and foolish; awful decisions were
made by men divorced from their own humanity. He thought that
universal peace was within reach if only people ceased to be stupid.

When he had pretended to be Trotsky, he had spoken well. But now that
he was trying to be both himself and a servant of the world, he was
failing. He persevered, believing that the simple act of faith, the
spirit of talking with the audience, would lead to a kind of
communion.

I thought this was really amazing because Gold's monologue, juxtaposed with his Chaplin character is doing at this point, explained the ending of The Great Dictator for me. Why real-life Chaplin is willing to turn the intense climax of his scathing film into a soppy train wreck: that's how he thinks he can actually make a difference. This is the only time you will listen. I still don't like the ending, but I have some sympathy in my Grinch-scale heart for the decision.

Over the break I also experienced a literature/film epiphany in the opposite direction. In my Constellation Games author commentary I say that I "reuse some of the character of Ariel from The Tempest, the guy with magic powers who gets bossed around all the time." But after rewatching The Little Mermaid I gotta admit that Ariel is also named after the girl who's so obsessed with an alien culture that she fills a cave with their incomprehensible stuff.

2014 Scrapbook, Part 2: That Belongs In A Museum

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Welcome back, let's check out some cool stuff I can't afford.

Providence

In March, before starting my job at NYPL, I took a trip to Providence to hang
out with Jake (still an awesome guy after nearly twenty years of friendship). Jake introduced me to
the Retro-Computing Society of Rhode
Island, who have an amazing museum. I say "museum", it's just
one big room, and it looks like this:

I believe that all museums have a room that looks like this; it's just that at RCSRI that room is coextant with the display portion of the museum.

RCSRI has an open house once a month, but we got a private tour
because Jake is a close personal friend of the proprietor.

The said proprietor, seen holding a Singer paper tape.
Just one of the incredible sights.
Good advice.
The front of a specialized tablet peripheral for CAD (?), about four feet square.
I can DIAL-A-VUP from the briny deep.

I took several detailed photos of the famous "space cadet"
keyboard for the Symbolics LISP machine, because although this
computer is famous in hacker lore, at the time there were no good
close-ups online. (I dunno about now. Well, there are now,
because I'm putting these up, but as I'm writing this draft, I don't
know.)

Overview.


RUB OUT




Note the four directional buttons with thumbs-up and thumbs-down.


Los Angeles

Museum of my youth, the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History.
Dino kids.

London

Along with my uncle Leonard I visited
the Worshipful Company of
Clockmakers, who have a museum of clockmaking in the back of
the London Guild Hall. The Guild Hall is still an active
government building, so make sure you go all the way round the
back for the museum, though I'm not sure why I'm even giving this
advice because apparently the Clockmakers' Museum has all been
packed up to be moved to the Science Museum. Anyway, I'm really
glad I got to see this little museum because it was full of tons
of amazing old clocks (many of which still run), and equipment for
building and repairing them.

Like this toolchest.

Another new favorite: the Tring tiles from the British
Museum. Two-panel comic strips show Jesus as a little kid getting
into trouble. "Left: A boy playfully leaps onto Jesus's back
and then falls dead. Right: Two women complain to
Joseph... while Jesus restores the boy to life."

And the parents
don't take this lying down! On another tile, "Parents shut their
children in an oven, to prevent them playing with Jesus." A
well-thought-out plan.

New York

From the Sidewalk Museum of Discarded Art, a picture of the New
York skyline made of Cheetos.

The Met had a fabulous exhibit with a lot of Xu Bing. I got my
chance to get some good photos of An Introduction to Square Word
Calligraphy, a set of rules for writing English words like they're
Chinese characters.

[image error]"Rain, rain, go away"
The alphabet.

And of course there was his masterpiece of eaten meaning, Book
From The Sky.

Man, I wish this had been the inspiration for Smooth Unicode instead of Allison's thing. Bring some class to my bots for once.

I also saw these assembly instructions for an Alexander Calder
mobile.

Do not lose!

And Paul
Klee's Carcasonne set.

Portland

Finally, on a trip to Portland I indulged in some Mondrian candy.

Liquid Velocity 3 by Jun Kaneko

2014 Scrapbook, Part 1

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As I'm sure you've noticed, the direction of NYCB has trended away in recent years from me journaling and putting up photos of everything I do shortly after I do it. With so many large companies encouraging millions of people to do this and mining the data to create more annoying ads, it doesn't seem as fun. Call me contrarian!

But before the end of the year I wanted to sort of catch you up with a little scrapbook
of some of the good times from 2014. This is mostly tourist and family
stuff; I've kept all the cool museum finds for a separate post.

West Coast

I took a brief trip to the Bay Area, where I sorted out a ton of
stuff in Kevin Maples's garage that we left with him when we moved
from San Francisco in 2005.

Like Russian Ricky Martin gum from 2001.
Or Sumana's grade-school poster on Lee Iacocca.

Sumana and I met up in Seattle for the Foolscap conference, where I
was a guest of honor along with Brooks Peck. It was my first con and
I had a great time! Thanks to Ron Hale-Evans for inviting me.

The official Guest of Honor portrait, or at least a photo from that session.
One of the installation pieces I ran at the conference, in its conference-hotel context.

Airplane!

In a pretty amazing development I got an email from Doug, a fan
of Constellation Games who keeps a private plane at a New
Jersey airport. We hung out one Saturday and he and his wife took me
and Sumana on a flight up the Hudson River.






Really fun random experience. Thanks, Doug.

England

In the summer I brought my acquired-on-the-cheap tuxedo to London for Rachel's wedding.

Wedding party.
Rachel's speech.
While in London I visited the incredible Monument to Heroic Self-Sacrifice

We went with the kids to Warwick Castle in... Warwickshire.

Celebrating its 1000th anniversary!
Castle Warwick was a huge tourist trap.
But it had great views...
...and siege machinery.

No trip is complete without a visit to The Butts.

The Holidays

We got some nice snow for Thanksgiving.
I made a TON of pie.

Christmas was the polar opposite--shirtsleeves at Disneyland.
I don't know if Susanna realized that this picture made her family look like we were all about to pull off a heist.
We made a TON of cookies.

The Year In Stone Lions

Rawr.
Rawr.
Rawr.

The Year In Reusable Orbiters

Susanna and kids underneath Endeavor.
The Intrepid's on-deck building holding the Enterprise, seen during the plane flight.

The Year In Signage

All of these are from the UK, because foreign signs are just funnier.


I thought the contrast between old and new style was really striking.
Oh no! Disappointment!
Possibly the worst sign in the world.

Public Service Film Roundup

Interstellar (2014): I'm doing a special edition of Film Roundup before the end of the month to stop innocent people from seeing Interstellar under the impression that it's a film like Gravity where the cheesy plot is redeemed by great space visuals. That's what I thought going in, but it turns out that the plot isn't just cheesy, it's really awful, and the space visuals don't in fact redeem it.

Those who have been reading Crummy since 1998 (so, basically, Kris) will be shocked at me saying this, but... this movie is worse than Armageddon. Armageddon is a dumb movie that thinks it's fun. Interstellar is a dumb movie that thinks it's smart. In Armageddon the horrible science was plastered over with an attitude of "You eggheads don't know anything about the real world of asteroid mining, let some working stiffs show you how it's done!" I found this offensive, but I admit it works cinematically. Interstellar has a worshipful attitude towards scientists who constantly make rookie mistakes and have no way of solving problems beyond squinting at blackboards real hard. It's ridiculous.

I saw this movie with Sarah and afterwards we considered the possibility that we were seeing an Idiocracy-style scenario, in which society has so denigrated science that anyone with an undergraduate-level understanding of physics is considered a genius. (There's an astronaut who's always referred to as "Dr. Mann", even his nameplate says "Dr. Mann" instead of giving his first name, because it's unheard of for an astronaut to also have a Ph.D.) And that reading would work, except for one minor detail: these bumbling fools are somehow able to develop advanced space flight and cryosleep without any support from the outside society.

I bring up the Armageddon comparison because there are just so many problems with this movie, not problems with sci-fi cliches like someone going through a black hole's event horizon without getting smushed, but huge plot-wreckers that the movie tries to address and fails.

The space visuals definitely deliver, but they're used sparingly, and to my surprise I lost a lot of interest when the action moved to space. I thought the first act's portrayal of a dying Earth was really good. I also think that's because its emotional tone is copied from Children of Men. Which brings me to Interstellar's second meta-problem: it's an anthology of movies that are better than it, most notably Children of Men, 2001, and Tarkovsky's Solaris. (Sarah also mentioned Sunshine, which I haven't seen.) I admit that 2001 and Solaris are long, slow movies, and there's something to be said for adapting those ideas and visuals to a blockbuster, but Interstellar is about the same length as either of those movies (it has a longer running time but a 21st-century credit roll) and not exactly action-packed.

The one bright spot in this movie: the robots. Their design initially appears clunky, but they prove very versatile, and it's never made clear whether they're intelligent (which would be kind of disturbing given how they're treated) or just highly anthropomorphized.

...And Maps

I've got some exciting new stuff for people who read NYCB but not my Twitter feed (which, if you consider the future, is the vast majority of everyone who reads NYCB). As I mentioned in the film roundup, I went to the Books in Browsers conference with my NYPL colleague James English. James gave an overview of the Library Simplified project we work on, and then I gave a talk I like to call (and did call) "Project Gutenberg Books are Real Books!".

Part of my work on Library Simplified is to integrate Project Gutenberg books into our ebook catalog. This sounds easy, and it is, so long as you're willing to treat Gutenberg books as second-class citizens that live in their own poorly-documented area. I'm trying to do something more like what Amazon did with its free Kindle books (BTW I recently discovered that they're selling the newer ones)—turn the Gutenberg texts into no-frills derivative editions that are nonetheless fully integrated into the storefront.

Second, there's a new Reef map, Reef #4: The Timeline, a cross-section of Minecraft history going from late 2010 to mid-2014. I think it's the most accessible of the Reef maps—it's small and it's obvious what's going on.

As is tradition, I introduced Reef #4 with a video, in which I compelled Lapis Lauri and Ron Smalec to race to the end of the Timeline for my own amusement (and theirs).

As you can tell I'm working on all kinds of stuff, notably something you will probably never see—the pitch document for Situation Normal. I really hate writing this stuff and it's a huge pain, but why write a book if you're not going to try to sell it?