Vex'd waqf nymph blurts, "Jock, zig!"

2011 book poll

tortoise — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:44:29 GMT

Here's what I've been reading over the past year!

View Poll: 2011 books

correct horse battery staple -- the sequel

tortoise — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 20:46:15 GMT

So, I was thinking about this comic. Four random words makes a great password when there aren't any length limitations, but that's often not the case. The obvious workaround is to shorten "correct horse battery staple" to "corhorbatsta", but if you're not careful you could lose a lot of entropy that way.

Here is a comma-separated list of a little over 2000 words, culled from the top 14000 in wiktionary's film/TV script list. Each has a unique three-letter prefix (except for the ones that are shorter than three characters long, where you can pad them out to something unique), so if you pick four random words off the list and shorten them each to their first three letters, you'll get a 12-character password with 44 bits of entropy that should hopefully be reasonably easy to remember.

Some specific notes:
1) For words that contain apostrophes in their first three characters, the prefix is unique whether you include the apostrophe or not.
2) I've done some hand-culling, mostly to remove really weird stuff (like "qfxmjrie", which appears in the wiktionary word list and nowhere else on the internet; presumably someone's cat jumped on their keyboard while they were compiling the list or something) as well as some alternate spellings of things like "okay"; if I've missed anything like that, I'd like to know about it.
3) I have however left in words that are probably made the list mostly because they show up a lot in one specific show or movie ("lebowski", "vader", "doh", "jaffa", "ziegler") as well as proper names in general.
4) The list is in no way bowdlerized.

Ashland 2011

tortoise — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 00:47:12 GMT

We saw the following plays:

Love's Labours Lost
I generally enjoyed this when I saw it, but as I go to write about it up I can't think of very much good to say about it. OSF really needs to learn that foreigners with broad accents are not automatically funny. Also, the tonal shift at the end felt really abrupt to me, and not in a good way. (I suppose this is a problem with the play, but I think past versions of it that I've seen managed to navigate it better.)

I fundamentally do not buy the Elizabethan Theater as a venue for Shakespearean comedy. I've seen a few of them there over the last several years, and it feels to me like, even when they're successful, it's despite the space rather than because of it. LLL is worse than most in this regard, because its profusion of parallel but not quite identical characters are even more confusing when they're really far away. (Histories seem to do better, because of all the pageantry. I'm totally excited about seeing Henry V in the Elizabethan next year; As You Like It, not so much.)

Also, the teenagers who sat behind me are going to the Special Hell.

The Imaginary Invalid
There was apparently a nifty set for this, that we didn't get to see life-sized because the Boehmer theater is currently out of commission, so they did it in some random gym instead, with most of the audience on folding chairs.

Nevertheless, it was a lot of fun. It's actually a lot like Love's Labours Lost from some sort of structural standpoint (really goofy until an unexpectedly somber ending), but it worked better for me. Part of that is that I didn't actually know the somberness was coming, but I think part of it is that it genuinely did feel better set up by the rest of the play.

I'm not sure how much of Moliere's text actually survived; between the health-care reform jokes and the '60s-era pop, the play didn't feel 18th-century at all.

Measure for Measure
This was a weird, uncomfortable, slightly disjointed version of a weird, uncomfortable, slightly disjointed play. I loved it.

It was extremely modernized — I think the program notes set it in "the fictional city of Vienna, USA" or some such — with most of the characters played as Hispanic. (Shakespeare's Italianate names — because, as you know, Vienna is totally in Italy — converted pretty well into Hispanic ones.) The Duke was oldish and spent the whole play in a state of panic; Isabella was young, rather clueless, and pretty clearly didn't actually want to be a nun. Angelo was icy and amazing.

This was also in the backup location, but the maquette looked really spare so I don't think we missed much. In fact it actually felt appropriate to be doing it in a slightly improvised location.

Julius Caesar
This was done in the round, with almost no set, a smidgen of audience participation, all the characters except the big four doubled up, and indistinct but vaguely modern dress. They cast a really young-looking Cassius opposite a sort of elder-statesman-ish Brutus, which I thought was an interesting dynamic.

The casting looked pretty gender-blind; Caesar was cast as a woman (with Antony taking over most of Calpurnia's lines). I don't have a problem with this in principle, but it did make Portia's "I grant that I am a woman, but..." speech feel really weird.

They took the intermission at a place that felt weird to me (between Antony's speech over Caesar's body and Brutus's funeral oration), and there was a significant tonal shift between the two halves. The first half was energetic and brutal; the second half was quieter and almost elegaic (except for "lend me your ears", which felt more like the first half again). I really liked both halves, but I'm not quite sure they belonged to the same play.

Finally, I'm a big fan of the idea that Antony is the kind of person who would go into a quarterstaff fight barehanded and win anyway, while Octavian is the kind of person who would take a pistol to a quarterstaff fight.

The Pirates of Penzance
This was at least as goofy as it's supposed to be. They did a lot of musical interpolation of more modern stuff, which was fun most of the time but a little annoying on the one or two instances where it replaced Sullivan's music rather than adding to it. There was a bunch of fun puppetry -- mostly flying things like seagulls (in the first act) and bats (in the second).

Also, I'm not sure this was intentional, but I think this production was more clearly set in 1877 rather than 1873 than any other version of the play I've ever seen. Which admittedly isn't saying much -- the reason I think this is because Frederick started to sing "When I'm Sixty-Four" at one point (but didn't actually get to the title line).

enormity

tortoise — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 06:31:36 GMT

So far as I can piece together from the OED, the story is this:

1. Initially, "enormous" and "enormity" both had strongly negative connotations. (They have roughly corresponding etymologies, though "enormous" comes directly from Latin and "enormity" comes via French.)
2. Over time, they came to be associated with very big things; this happened somewhat earlier for "enormous" than "enormity".
3. Something happened around 1850 to make the OED decide that any use of "enormity" to mean "bigness" after that time was a usage error. By 1890, there's a citation of it as a usage error from a dictionary, so the idea that "enormity" can only mean "heinousness" was well-entrenched by then.

My question: does anyone know what that something was? Was there an organic decline in the use of "enormity" to mean "bigness", or did someone (who?) just decide to make a shibboleth out of it, and it propagated?

On some level I have trouble believing in the descriptive version of what's happening here (people just stopped using "enormity" to mean "bigness"), because even 150 years later people are still complaining about it, whereas nobody ever complains about people using the Austen definition of "sensitivity".

stuff about polynomials

tortoise — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 02:03:42 GMT

So, I think of the following things as being standard high-school fare:

1. Synthetic division
2. Finding all the rational roots of a polynomial with integer coefficients by factoring its leading and trailing terms.

Ariel doesn't.

Which one of us do you guys think is right?

Complicating factors include:

a) There was one year of math that I learned out of a textbook. So if it was covered in that book, I probably learned it whether or not I was really supposed to (unless I thought it was hard at the time -- I seem to recall getting stuck on its explanation of matrix multiplication, for example) and mentally filed it under "stuff people learn in that class".
b) Ariel's high school algebra was kind of spotty, so she might not have learned it even if it was standard.

2010 books read

tortoise — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 18:14:09 GMT

I'm not going to finish another book today, so have a reading poll!

View Poll: 2010 books read

my annoyed realization of the day

tortoise — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 05:43:03 GMT

It's not actually possible to compute degrees of consanguinity with an ammeter.

some moderately absurd nitpicking

tortoise — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 23:30:57 GMT

1. The frame story of the Arabian Nights is set "at the time of the Sasanid dynasty" (224-651) -- i.e., sometime before the rise of Islam. A bunch of the internal stories mention Islam or are set during the reign of the caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809). Are we to conclude that Shahrazad is a time-traveler?
2. It takes me almost exactly three minutes to read the first night aloud. Even supposing that English is a more compact language than... whatever it is we're supposed to imagine they're speaking (the manuscript is in Arabic, the frame story is set in India, and all the names in it are Persian), and taking into account the fact that there's definitely more going on that night than storytelling, that makes the timing seem awfully precise. Did she know to start telling her story ten minutes before sunrise? Surely it makes more sense for her to have started a few hours earlier...

Am I imagining things?

tortoise — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 19:39:46 GMT

Or did LJ's clickbox quizzes used to report results as a percentage of the number of people voting, rather than as a percentage of the votes received?

It certainly makes a lot more sense than what they're doing now...

random thought of the day

tortoise — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:59:13 GMT

Someone who does themed movie nights (i.e., not me) should do a "movies that are better than Citizen Kane" night, including How Green Was My Valley and Chimes At Midnight. I'm not sure if there's an obvious third movie; I suppose you could cop out and watch Citizen Kane itself.

Of course, this requires finding a copy of Chimes At Midnight...

dear lazyweb,

tortoise — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 19:41:50 GMT

Now that bloglines is disappearing, what RSS aggregator should I use?

I now have something else to search used book stores for

tortoise — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:45:39 GMT

This has to be the best edition of Northanger Abbey ever. Sadly, none of Amazon, Powells, Abebooks, and Alibris seem to sell it.

Ariel thinks it needs to go on a bookshelf next to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies et al.

this sounds like a riddle, but it's a serious question

tortoise — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 15:30:45 GMT

What lives in the midwest, is roughly the size and shape of a mouse, and moves by jumping?

(I'd like to imagine that I was just the first person ever to observe the rare American Miniature Dwarf Kangaroo in the wild, but it seems unlikely...)

RVP

tortoise — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 03:30:46 GMT

Anyone who has reason to be fond of the murder of the Duke of Clarence really ought to check this video out.

Stratford

tortoise — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:29:26 GMT

I just realized that this has been sitting on my hard drive since I got back on Sunday. Since we're moving tomorrow and likely to be internet-less until Tuesday, I figure I should probably post it now, even though I think I'd originally been planning on saying a little more...

Last weekend, we went to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival with my family. We saw:

Thursday afternoon: Two Gentlemen of Verona
This was a fun, fluffy version of a fun, fluffy play, set as a vaudeville-era backstage romance. As such, there were a bunch of interpolations of bits of other plays, seen from the back and played to recorded applause. My favorite of these was probably a ridiculously melodramatic version of the last scene of Othello.

The two lower-class clowns were extremely funny, though I had trouble remembering which of them was which. They did a great job of bringing out the wordplay in their roles, which I don't remember noticing in my one previous experience with the play.

If I have any complaint about it, it's that it didn't really try to make the ending of the play make sense. Then again, I'm not sure how you could.

Friday afternoon: The Winter's Tale
I loved everything about this, and don't have much more to say about it than "things X, Y, and Z were awesome".

Leontes was fantastic, and had an excellent character arc despite only really having half of a play to get through it all. There was a very clear and chilling moment when he slipped from friend mode into absolute monarch mode. During the play I thought they'd found it in the text as the point where he starts using the royal we, but I looked at a copy of the play in the gift shop afterward and he actually uses it throughout, so it must have been all in the acting.

Paulina owned the stage whenever she was allowed onto it. (Incidentally, the actress who played her apparently gets to be Richard III next year, which I expect to be really neat -- she definitely has the required stage presence.)

The bear was impressively scary if not particularly bear-like (if I had to describe it in two words, they would probably be "killer robot", even though the play was mostly Renaissance-y in concept other than that). I don't have any problem believing that bears look like that on the coast of Bohemia, though...

In the second half of the play, Father Time was really goofy (they literally flew him in on some sort of see-saw contraption which also had the ability to spin him head-over-heels, and exploited this ability shamelessly throughout). This worked really well -- after all, having Father Time come out to apologize to your audience is really goofy, and it definitively established the shift from tragedy to comedy.

Autolycus was totally shameless and very funny, especially in a couple excellent audience-interaction gags.

I also really liked the shepherds, especially the younger one. The whole extended joke about him being a gentlemen born, and having been for at least four hours, was really well done.

And I cried at the ending.

Friday evening: The Tempest
This was the flagship production, with the big-name star (Christopher Plummer playing Prospero), incredibly flashy effects, and rave reviews; it's apparently entirely sold out for the rest of the season. Everyone who wasn't me seemed to love it. I liked it a lot, and respected it, but had a few minor niggles that kept me from going quite that far.

First, while Plummer's Prospero was an interesting, very well played, and entirely believable character, he didn't quite make sense to me as Prospero -- I wasn't entirely convinced in him being as much of a manipulator as Prospero has to be. Second, while a lot of the magic worked really well, there were a few parts of it that I found distracting; in particular there was a set of strobe-ish lights that flashed over the audience and worked really well for the storm scene at the beginning of the play, but then kept recurring to signify that magic was happening in ways I found distracting.

Everything else about the play was great. Ariel in particular was incredible; she was simultaneously otherworldly and very approachable.

Saturday afternoon: As You Like It
The acting was really good (except that Rosalind made one or two questionable choices of line reading). The sets were gorgeous. The concept was... spotty.

The forest was sometimes spooky and sometimes the Magical Land of Jazz, and didn't really meld the two ideas very effectively. I think I would have liked it better if they'd gone further with the jazz concept; the music was really fun, possibly the best part of the show. The court was a very scary military dictatorship with lots of goose-stepping. This sometimes worked -- Oliver's redemption made a lot more sense than I think it usually does, as he was very obviously frightened into it -- but it made the ending fall flat to me as Duke Frederick was just too weighty a villain for the random one-line offscreen redemption he gets.

Touchstone was quite dapper and Jaques kind of peculiar, which I thought was a nice reversal. Jaques was the only member of the banished court who bothered to bring an umbrella, which seemed entirely appropriate.

The Rosalind-Celia interactions were also very well done; I liked watching Celia get more and more exasperated with Rosalind's flirting with Orlando, only to have the roles reversed when Oliver showed up. I didn't see the Rosalind-as-artist thing going anywhere interesting, though.

Overall this falls into the category of plays that I probably would have liked better in rehearsal than in performance.

shockingly, Google doesn't give me any hits that suggest someone else has thought of these

tortoise — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 02:09:16 GMT

"These are the best asymptotes ever!" said Tom hyperbolically.

"I seem to have trouble maintaining a single focus," said Tom elliptically.

overnegation alert!

tortoise — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 21:23:17 GMT

"...Apple officials denied that an email purportedly sent by chief executive Steve Jobs on the subject of the iPhone 4's antenna problems was a fake."

lightbulb

tortoise — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 18:13:46 GMT

"Eeyore" is onamatopoeic!

Dear people who are more familiar with FPS engines than I,

tortoise — Mon, 17 May 2010 02:16:27 GMT

Is there any way to turn arbitrary objects upside down in Portal that doesn't involve portal shenanigans?

(This question is brought to you by the Department of That One Puzzle I Solved With an Office Chair Where the Walkthrough I Looked At Afterwards Used a Cube.)

someone is wrong not-on the Internet

tortoise — Mon, 10 May 2010 05:18:37 GMT

This article (which I've seen linked to in a couple places, none of which normally write about UK politics) is clearly wrong-headed--it wants you to conclude "since 16000 votes is an extremely small fraction of the electorate, the Conservative Party was extremely close to attaining a majority", but that doesn't follow at all unless there was some a priori reason to single out those 16000 votes.

It's interesting to think about about precisely what that statistic is saying, though. If you want to shift $d$ seats in an $n$-seated parliament, with a total electorate of size $E$, dimensional analysis says you should typically expect to need to shift on the order of $(d/n)^2*E/2$ votes[*]. Setting $d=19$, $n=650$, and $E=2.5*10^7$, we see that the expected shift is something like 11000 votes--that is, if anything it looks like the Conservatives need to flip slightly more votes than you'd expect given how far they are from a majority seat-wise.

Deriving a more rigorously justified version of this formula is a semi-interesting calculus exercise. If I've done my math right, the only extra factor that shows up--if you're talking about the average number of votes you need to shift to get some smallish number of constituencies over any threshold percentage--is essentially the difference in percentages between your best and worst constituency, and thus is less than 1. Of course, the median voter theorem implies that the threshold of "winning the seat" is probably not a typical one, but dealing properly with that would require actual data, and it probably wouldn't fit on the back of this envelope.

[*] The graph of the relevant votes is triangle-shaped, which why I'm throwing in a factor of 2 even though this is obtained through dimensional analysis.

I try to figure out how widely-shared an association of mine is

tortoise — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 06:37:53 GMT

Suppose someone was named Nathaniel. Where would you say they're most likely to be from?

fantasy casting

tortoise — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:56:06 GMT

This is probably of varying comprehensibility depending on how much your TV-watching (and, in a few cases, theater-going) overlaps with mine. I had fun putting it together, though...

Picard
Riker
Data
Worf
Crusher
Troi
Geordi
Guinan
Q
Ro
Wesley (a Stratford actor)
O'Brien

I still need a Tasha. The only idea I've had probably qualifies as far too obvious.

administrivia

tortoise — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:43:00 GMT

The conclusion of the half-an-hour I just spent on the phone with tech support: the modem in our apartment is probably dead.

My cell will be on and near me until we get a new one (allegedly by Monday).

confusing the algorithm

tortoise — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:53:25 GMT

Out of idle curiosity about snowclone patterns, I just did a google search for '"my god it's full of" -stars'.

Most of the hits seemed to be more or less what you'd expect (blog posts with titles like "My god, it's full of unicorns!" and that sort of thing). One, however, was this picture.

Of course, that was the one I clicked on, because I had to know why it was that it came up. I still don't; there's nothing on the page that suggests it, so I'm assuming it has to do with the text someone uses to link to it or something.

I realized afterwards, though, that I was logged into my google account when I did this. Which means I just informed google that, when I search for snowclones from '60s sci-fi, what I really want is baklava.

ask LJ

tortoise — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:21:28 GMT

Dear LJ,

I have a several-years-old bottle of pomegranate molasses that I just opened for Nefarious Purposes. I'm not too worried about it having actually gone bad; the sell-by date is only a year ago (keeping in mind that I bought it in, like, 2005) and it smells and tastes fine--what I can get of it.

Unfortunately, it's also congealed to the point where I can't actually get any of it out of the bottle; inverting the bottle for as long as I have patience produces literally no observable movement in the molasses. Probing it with a chopstick reveals that it's liquid enough that I could spoon it out, if I could get a spoon in; unfortunately the neck of the bottle is way too narrow for that. Any thoughts on how to actually get anything out?

Things I've thought of:
1) It's a glass bottle, so options that involve breaking the neck off must necessarily involve some finesse. (Keep in mind when considering how I might go about breaking the bottle: I do not own a blowtorch, and the stove I have access to is electric.)
2) In principle I could possibly try diluting it with water, as it's going to be diluted with water in this recipe anyway, but I'm not using all of it and I might want to use it undiluted later, so I'd rather not.
3) At the moment I have the bottle soaking in a hot water bath, but it doesn't seem to be doing much. Since it was sitting in a cupboard and not a refrigerator for those several years, I'm not optimistic.
4) Buying more pomegranate molasses means either having better google-fu than I do or making a trip to Albany Park or possibly Evanston, both more than an hour away on public transit. It also means delaying my Nefarious Plan by some small number of days.