Tales of the Golem; or, the Modern Epimetheus

I got a crazy teacher he wears dark glasses

Today's question: Should academic tenure be abolished?

posted by Richard Mason @ Friday, July 28, 2006 0 comments

I'm burning through the skies yeah two hundred degrees that's why they call me Mister Fahrenheit

Today's question: Why does the media ignore the threat of deadly asteroid impacts?

posted by Richard Mason @ Friday, July 28, 2006 0 comments

I was talking to Ed who'd been reported dead by mutual friends

The paper version of the Caltech alumni newsletter says that it's no longer going to bother printing an obituary section.

Supposedly, the obituaries will be available online, although right now the ones online seem to be a year out of date.

This seems backwards to me since the people with the most reason to read the obituary section seem the least likely to be reading it online. But perhaps that's an old-fashioned attitude.

posted by Richard Mason @ Wednesday, July 26, 2006 1 comments

The cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood

We went to see a production of Into the Woods at Santa Monica College. It wasn't bad. I would say it was noticeable that the Witch wasn't Bernadette Peters, and also the spear-carrier actors with just a couple of lines had less talent than I would expect in a professional production. But for all the rest of the cast in between the biggest and smallest parts, I thought they compared favorably to professionals.

Whether or not a cow is a good trade for five magic beans, I used to think that one denarius would buy you ten asses. Well, that is what the name means, but (I now discover) it didn't mean ten four-legged asses, it meant ten copper coins called asses. A copper as would buy a few loaves of bread.

posted by Richard Mason @ Tuesday, July 25, 2006 3 comments

No colors any more I want them to turn black

We watched Taxi Driver and it reminded me of the character Rorschach from Watchmen.

I've commented before that Alan Moore is one of the foremost proponents of the "great artists steal" philosophy. I feel pretty sure that Rorschach's diary entries ranting about the city being an open sewer were directly inspired by Travis Bickle's diary entries, uh, ranting about the city being an open sewer and so forth. And of course Travis Bickle is a would-be vigilante hero like Rorschach.

Meanwhile another element in Rorschach's history was directly lifted from the movie Mad Max.

I wonder if there are any other vigilante movies that were direct inspirations for the Rorschach character.

posted by Richard Mason @ Monday, July 24, 2006 1 comments

Analyzing and implying, you know

I got the author proofs back for a journal article, along with a demand that I reply within 48 hours (but I didn't notice that demand right away). Then I got strident emails asking me to send any corrections in 24 hours, and so forth. So I had to devote an evening to correcting all the stuff the journal had mangled for no good reason.

A partial list:

• carefully typeset table replaced by the laziest, worst-looking table imaginable, with no lines separating rows or columns, just ragged text bunched together, one subheading made into the main heading of the table and another subheading made into a regular line of the table
• one perfectly good sentence rewritten so that it made no sense
• the word "ladars" replaced with "LADARs" throughout
• the word "misapprehend" replaced with "miscomprehend"
• figure 1 and figure 2 were not explicitly referred to in the body of the text, so they inserted a reference to those figures, in completely the wrong place.

They also had a mania for insisting that every abbreviation or acronym (like LADAR) be expanded and not shortened at all if only used once. In general I suppose this is good practice, but abbreviations like USB? VGA? I feel there are more people who will recognize the acronym than will recognize the expanded form.

In general, I have a low tolerance for being edited.

Anyway, what's with the "reply in 48 hours or suffer the consequences"? This is July. I could reasonably be on vacation in Tahiti, as far as they know. I hate to think of them printing their nastified version just because I didn't get back to them in time.

posted by Richard Mason @ Friday, July 21, 2006 0 comments

You'll have to take me just the way that you find me

Today I gave the railgun talk, for reasons that don't bear explanation, to a group of managers from the graphics processor company nVidia.

It was warmly received ("this is the greatest presentation ever") but there was also an embarrassing moment when I showed a curve fit and they asked, "What is R^2 = 0.9581?" I couldn't remember what R^2 was called.

Um, I guess that would be the square of the correlation coefficient.

The nVidia managers were quite interesting people.

posted by Richard Mason @ Wednesday, July 19, 2006 3 comments

I'm so fat on you I won't never be skinny no more

If you ever get an invitation to a potluck barbecue where all the attendees write food blogs, then I suggest you go.

Because that will probably be some potluck barbecue.

posted by Richard Mason @ Sunday, July 16, 2006 2 comments

So dial zero for assistance if this all confuses you

So long to the seven-digit phone number... I just learned that as of July 26, we can no longer make seven-digit phone calls within the 310 area code.

There will be a new area code 424 that occupies the same territory as "the 310." (Represent!)

All phone calls shall require ten digits.

posted by Richard Mason @ Friday, July 14, 2006 1 comments

Makes me say oh my Lord what is this garbage here?

We watched Grey's Anatomy for the first and I hope only time tonight.

It is god awful.

That is all.

posted by Richard Mason @ Thursday, July 13, 2006 5 comments

They give us the greens of summers

posted by Richard Mason @ Tuesday, July 11, 2006 2 comments

I took a walk around the world to ease my troubled mind

We went to see Superman Returns.

On the positive side: Nice visual effects, everything in the movie looks very pretty. Superman catchphrases and references and homages to the earlier movies are included in a natural way.

Negative: Unimaginative script, in many ways a retread of the 1978 movie. When a novel plot element is introduced, it's generally abandoned and left unexplored or unexplained. Just about everything else is resolved in the least imaginative way possible. Unnecessarily slow, with far too many long shots of Clark doing nothing but moon over Lois or vice versa.

Specific gripes in the comments.

posted by Richard Mason @ Saturday, July 01, 2006 3 comments