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It’s a new record for delay in a sliver moon report! The sliver moon window will open again on Friday, and yet I’m only now recording last month’s sliver moon sighting. I’ve seen many a sliver moon since I began this journal, but I believe this is the first one that I sighted from an airplane (and only from an airplane). We’re at the time of year when evening sliver moons should be easy-peasy to sight, the Ecliptic being so close to vertical after sunset; but the whole trick is that too view a sliver moon in the sky, no matter how far above the horizon, it is necessary to have visibility above a mile or two above ground level—and that’s one thing we’ve had over a total of about four hours since last October. No wonder our nighttime temperatures have risen so much in the last couple of decades—it’s solid overcast all night long around here, all the time. At sunset on February 12 I was peering out the right-side window of a Boeing 737 on the Hopkins Airport tarmac, wondering at the near absence of clouds above. Only a soaring zigzag of cirrus sullied the western horizon. I knew where to look for the two-day sliver moon, but I couldn’t spy it anywhere. Then I realized I was looking too low, and twisted my neck around to get a view straight up. In the upper edge of the window I could see a misshapen, glowing sickle I knew was the sliver moon. Did that count as an official sliver-moon sighting?, I wondered. I mean, photons from the sliver moon fell on my retinas, but I didn’t really see it in the sense that it formed a pleasant image in my mind. Also, I’d nearly slipped a disc trying to look upward enough; a real sliver-moon viewing shouldn’t cause that much pain. Figured I’d have a better chance a while later, en route, as the sliver moon slipped nearer the horizon. Then realized I was sitting on the north side of the plane during our hop to Chicago. Eeps. Fortunately, we angled south for a couple of minutes while getting lined up on the approach path, and I was rewarded with a crystal-clear Cheshire Cat moon in a midnight-blue sky. Below, a layer of stratus clouds hugged the earth so closely that it must almost have looked like fog from ground level. I imagine that’s what home has looked like for the last four months or so. Tags: sliver_moon
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I really hate insomnia. Overall, I’m getting an adequate amount of sleep; but in any one night I’m getting either two hours or twelve hours, with nothing in between. Luckily, it’s only a matter of time before my wildly oscillating sleep schedule dampens down and I can reliably zonk out more or less through the night again. One side benefit, though, is that I’m in a good position (i.e., sitting up in bed, reading) to catch an early-morning sliver moon, as I did last Sunday (11 November): a bright sickle of a two-and-a-half-day sliver moon, well to the left of an early-rising Venus. ’Twas an especially welcome sight after those two weeks of unremitting overcast skies culminating in the high winds, lashing rain and general power-outageness of Sandy. If you happen to be awake during the predawn hour on Tuesday, 11 December, you may be in for a special treat: a sliver moon riding along a string three planets—Saturn, Venus and Mercury (listed from high to low). Viewing from the US West Coast, you’ll see Venus and the moon just about in conjunction (actual time of conjunction 8:08 AM EST, 13:08 GMT). And Mercury will be bright enough (magnitude –0.6) to see even when the rising sun has considerably lightened the sky; brighter than any star in the vicinity, and in fact brighter than any star in the northern sky except Sirius (which will be setting around the same time in the southwest). I may even set my alarm to get up and see all this, provided that the insomnia has backed off my then. Tags: astronomy, sliver_moon
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In honor of today’s blue moon*—the last until July 31, 2015—I’m posting my last sliver moon sighting a full two weeks late. This time of year, an evening sliver moon is nearly impossible to see this far north unless you have a good view of the western horizon and a crystal-clear sky—and most of the time I’m 0 for 2. I must rely on my almost superhuman insomnia and finite bladder capacity to get me up before dawn, two days before the new moon, and on 15 August that’s exactly what happened. Sometime around six in the morning I got up and spied a perfect two-day sliver moon hovering above the neighbors’ huge tree silhouetted in the east, with Venus blazing away a bit higher up. If you see the dazzling full moon tonight, also look for the Summer Triangle high and to the west (of the moon). If you orient the three bright stars to form a V, the star at the point of the V is Altair, with Deneb and Vega at the top left and right, respectively. __________________ *The full moon occurred just before 10:00 AM EDT (13:58 GMT) August 31. If you live in North America and saw the moon last night (August 30/31) after midnight, it was closer to full then that it will be tonight. Tags: sliver_moon
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The weather over the last month has alternated between “tolerable” and “infernal.” Last Thursday was definitely the latter, with a high temperature over 90 °F and dew point well into the 70s. On a day like that, you have to put your Slurpee on an entire mound of towels, or the lake of condensation will engulf the tabletop and run off directly into your lap. Late in the afternoon, and knowing that the forecast predicted thunderstorm activity, I checked the Doppler radar in case I needed to delay my ride home. Looked like we were going to get clobbered, but not ’til well after I got home. The bad news was that the storms would arrive just in time to obscure the two-day sliver moon. I should have known. Every time we’re promised a good thunderstorm on a hot, muggy day, and a huge squall line appears to be bearing down on us, it either swerves southward at the last moment, or dissipates. I looked out to the west just after sunset, and above a shelf of rapidly dispersing cumulus clouds, there rode the two-day sliver moon, just visible as a cream-colored sickle in a periwinkle sky. (Periwinkle was one of my favorite Crayola 64 colors.) As I write this, one week later, we’re trying to cool off from an afternoon that reached 96 °F at the local airport. Now midnight, the temperature has plummeted to a brisk 88 °F, and the dew point to a parched 75 °F. Oh, well—sleeping won’t be any more difficult than in our hotel room in Maui a few years ago. Time to crank up the ceiling fan to “Full Gale.” Tags: sliver_moon
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One reason I haven’t been posting much to LJ this year is that I’ve been spending far too much time on line surfing BoardGameGeek. I don’t have anywhere near the level of sheer obsession displayed by many BGG regulars, who boast of owning over 500 games and post pictures of entire rooms devoted to storing their collections. Nonetheless, I enjoy learning about new games (of which I’ve ’blogged before), and when someone asks a probability/statistics question on the forums, I delight in racing to figure out and post the answer before anyone else does. I was first exposed to BGG while looking for references to obscure games I played in my early childhood. A long while back I wrote about two of them, genuine, drug-inspired products of the 1960s. I’d like to tell you of two more that were more difficult to track down: I remembered hardly anything about them, least of all their names..
Several of us in my first-grade class got to cut out for part of the school day and play games, because we could already read and do basic arithmetic. Not that we were super-geniuses, or anything—at least some of us were destined to mediocrity as high-school students; it was just that our parents had been unusually involved in teaching us stuff when they should have been doing more useful things like sitting semi-comatose in front of the TV. We didn’t entirely goof around: we played educational, primarily math-related games. One that we didn’t like very much was Tuf, a maths dice game in which players tried to build the longest mathematical equation. All but the most basic arithmetical dice completely stumped us. We didn’t know anything about percentages or grouping by parentheses, let alone logarithms and all the other scary stuff on the orange die. We played a different math dice game that I enjoyed much more. All I remember about it was that it used a big handful of dice marked with numbers between 1 and 18, and that using higher numbers scored more points. What’s the chance I’d actually find the game in the BGG database? Pretty good, actually. One evening when I was putting off work I called up all the mathematical games using BGG’s search function. I could thin the herd by about two-thirds right off the bat, since my game had to exist in the early 70s, but many didn’t have publication dates, so I still had to scan though several hundred possibilities. And there it was! Unlike Tuf, Heads Up provided the equations; all you needed to do is fill in the numbers using the dice. And sure enough, using larger numbers scored better: the score was the total of all numbers in correct equations. I was wrong about the upper limit, though: the numbers only went up to 15.
( I’ve got another one…Collapse )Tags: games, nostalgia
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Woohoo—I got to see Tuesday’s transit of Venus with my own eyes! I’d been waiting for the day ever since I missed the transit of 2004: it was over before sunrise on the American West Coast. Lots of amazing pictures appeared on the ’Net. I remember best this iconic photo, taken at dawn on the Florida coast:  Google honored the event with a custom icon.  Several months ago, I bought a couple of Solar Viewers—really just pieces of #14 welder’s glass in frames—in anticipation of this week’s transit. I gave them a test run during the annular eclipse on May 20. The eclipse hadn’t even started when the sun slid behind the ever-present stratus clouds on the western horizon, but I still gained some wisdom, for I was reminded of something I already knew, but didn’t appreciate: the sun is actually very small in the sky, when reduced to its actual disk. I knew full well that the sun and full Moon are about the same size as viewed from Earth, and I had read that both appear about the same size as a US quarter at a distance of nine feet (2.7 m), but, really, it isn’t as big as I felt it should be. I started to wonder how I’d ever see Venus—only a third the sun’s distance, but only 1/120 its diameter—against the solar disk without magnification. Venus’s apparent diameter should be about 1/40 the sun’s, I figured. But the planetary silhouettes in both the Florida photo and the Google icon look much larger than that. Also, the frame of the Solar Viewer advertised that it was good for viewing planetary transits*—which means Venus, since there is no way Mercury would be visible against the sun without considerable magnification (not to mention an above-entry-level solar filter). So, would I see Venus or not? ( Continue for more pix…Collapse )Tags: astronomy
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Again, I’m way late with the sliver moon update. I have not had much fun this week, but that’s a long story (and a rather disgusting one). I wasn’t sure I was going to get to see last Tuesday’s two-day sliver moon, even after the sky cleared up in the afternoon: I was scheduled to have dinner with my two semi-bosses and a visiting scientist from Harvard, a VIP with whom we hoped to collaborate on eye-disease research. The dinner wasn’t scheduled to begin until 7:30, and as the most junior member of the party by far, I doubted I could skip out early just because the sun had set and there were sliver moons to be viewed. As it happened, our table had enough of a view to the west that I could gauge when the evening sky had darkened enough for good sliver-moon viewing. When the dusk had progressed enough that the first stars would likely be visible, I excused myself as if to go to the bathroom, strolled off in a dignified manner until I was out of view, and then sprinted outside, into a courtyard with a decent view to the west. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but for some reason it was midsummer hazy. Odd, given how unsettled the weather had been all day. The sliver moon and Venus, almost side by side, were well above the horizon but already starting to turn Creamsicle orange; the moon looked very slivery, indeed, despite being two full days past new. We adjourned around 9:15. Venus and sliver moon had by then deepened to a lovely, full orange, and the moon’s “horns” were beginning to disappear in the haze.
I missed the great eclipse of 20 May, sigh; it began here almost precisely at sunset. (If I’d known about it enough in advance, I’d have scheduled a trip out west with a stop in, say, Reno, to view the annular eclipse. I plan to watch two total eclipses, on 21 August, 2017 and 8 April, 2024 (which won’t require any traveling!); I need to put the annular eclipse of 14 October 2023 on the agenda.) However, weather permitting, I’ll be perfectly situated to watch next Tuesday’s transit of Venus. I bought a couple of “Solar Viewers”, really just pieces of welder’s glass in frames, specifically for the occasion. You don’t want to miss the transit if you can help it—the next one won’t occur until 2117! ( Transits of Mercury are much more common—fourteen during the 21st century alone—but there’s no way you could see one with equipment you can buy for twenty bucks.) While looking for the local time of the transit, I stumbled across this really handy site that shows precise times and the apparent path of Venus across the face of the Sun. I hadn’t appreciated just how much the Earth’s rotation curves the path; at the equator, Venus actually traces out a loop near the edge of the Sun’s disk. Aw, crap. The site has an embeddable transit simulator, but when I tried to place it on this page I only got a big black rectangle. Oh, well—you should try it out. Tags: astronomy, sliver_moon
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Last Monday’s sliver moon was so easy to spot—a late, two-and-a-half-day waxing sliver moon only a month from the spring equinox—I feel kind of embarrassed taking credit for it. But sliver moon sightings are seldom enough around there that take credit I will. We’ve had two kinds of days in April: butt cold and midsummer hot. Monday evening was one of the former, and also very windy. The sliver moon rode above a raft of stratus-like clouds that, even from miles away, had a distinctly shredded, wintry appearance. Have you ever been on final descent in an airplane in the early evening, and as a curtain of silhouetted clouds sweeps up toward you, you see how the cloud tops, from up close, don’t really have sharp outlines, but rather are sort of ragged and wispy? The western horizon looked just like that, but from a distance. It must have been a hurricane up there. I looked again, about 45 minutes later, and the moon had descended well into the cloud layer. It was all fuzzy and indistinct, as if dissolving in the murk. If you get a chance, try and find Venus in the west after sunset. It’ll be easy-peasy if you can see the sky at all. You’ve probably been seeing it for months; Venus has been the brightest object in that part of the sky (apart from an itinerant crescent moon) all spring, and this week it’s at its most dazzling. More amazing still, it won’t set until well after 11:00 PM, unless perhaps you live in the easternmost portion of your time zone (Boston and DC, perhaps). Tags: sliver_moon
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Today’s lesson learned: Don’t go to 7-Eleven the evening of a $640-million lottery drawing. All I wanted was a Slurpee. Honestly. It’s usually a twenty-second transaction. I should have copped a clue when I pulled in the parking lot and found myself in a traffic pattern worthy of LAX. Didn’t get any better when I went in. A huge, muscular guy I’d seen working there a couple times before was hanging out by the registers, obviously there to quell incipient riots. And they needed him, too; the atmosphere was one of barely restrained panic—and there were still five hours to go before the drawing. Had no problem drawing my Slurpee: I had the Slurpee machines, as well as the rest of the food-and-drink part of the store, to myself. I gritted my teeth and queued up at the back of the crowd. I won’t call it a “line” because I’m too much of a mathematician to apply that label to a disorderly mob all trying at once to capture the attention of two harried cashiers. I’ve complained before about lottery-ticket buyers at 7-Eleven; but this time surpassed anything I'd ever seen. The couple immediately in front of me got stuck at the register for several minutes trying to figure out how to purchase lottery tickets, while the outer echelons got progressively more hysterical. These were people who had all the trappings of being fully functional members of society; the sheer turmoil must have unnerved them. Also, in their defense, I note that the cashier did a terrible job with the vending part. They had clearly never played the lottery before. Under the circumstances, the transaction should have gone like this. Buyer: “Want!” [ hands Seller coin of the realm] Seller: [ delivers Buyer printed tickets, says nothing] But when they said, “Uh, we’d like some, uh, lottery…things…” the cashier, ignoring the $640-million elephant in the room, asked them what game they wanted to play. And when they didn’t immediately respond—they of course didn’t remember the name “Mega Millions”—she started listing all the games and their variations, and when the drawings would occur for each. This only intimidated the couple more; they clammed up, and the cashier kept not telling them what they obviously wanted to hear, which was, “Here’s your numbers. Enjoy your $600 million.” Another weird thing: You might think (as I did) that they’d be selling nothing but Mega Millions tix as fast as the printer could spit them out. But it appeared that the regulars were also purchasing vast numbers of their usual scratch cards, in proportion to the increased number of Mega Millions games. Why? What kind of universe that claims to make sense occasionally would permit this to occur? Am kind of surprised I’m not still there, jockeying for position to pay for the Slurpee I’d long since finished (or spilled). I can’t even imagine what it’ll be like if nobody wins tonight, and the jackpot advances to nearly $1 billion for Tuesday. Tags: lottery
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Last week was our yearly trip to Las Vegas to meet Dad and the sister and to generally goof around. It was a pleasure this year to see the brother, as well—he hasn’t joined us in Vegas since sometime in the 90s. Was lots of fun, as always, but unexceptional for our Las Vegas vacations, except for one bit: Friday morning we drove out to the Pinball Hall of Fame and Museum a couple miles east of the Strip. (I’ve written of the Museum before; it’s a delightful nostalgia pit). In our eagerness, we arrived 20 minutes before it actually opened. There was little we could do but hang around outside and soak up the copious, life-giving sunshine. (I got more sun in four days in Vegas than in the past three months here.) I’d knocked back several iced teas at breakfast, and the floodwaters were rising with alarming rapidity. I excused myself and jogged about half a mile down Tropicana Ave. to a Texaco that looked big enough to have bathrooms. Luckily, the ’strooms were inside, so I didn’t have to ask for a key, but the men’s was occupied when I arrived, and continued to be occupied for a looong time. I walked nearly a mile in a tight circle next to the beef jerky aisle before the door finally opened. I expected the occupant to be a senior citizen carrying a freshly- and completely-read copy of the New York Times, but instead a young man emerged: he was maybe six feet five, weighed about 130 pounds, and wore a dirty baseball cap atop a blond version of the Weird Al frizz. You know the heavy clouds of mist generated by dry ice in water, which hug the ground and slowly spread out across the floor like an amoeba? Well, the bathroom emitted something similar, but consisting of pot smoke. As I stepped inside, I faced a dilemma: Should I take enough time to let the remainder of the smoke to clear out, in hopes that the next person wouldn’t think it was me? Or should I try and finish up really fast so that it wouldn’t completely saturate my clothes and make me smell like a pothead? Not sure which I decided on; my memory of the next few minutes, like the interior of that men's room, was rather hazy. But before I left I apparently bought a Mounds bar as compensation for the use of the facilities, and stowed it in the pocket of my windbreaker. The rest of the vacation went well, and I thought no more about my Mounds bar—until last night, just after dinner. It had stayed in my pocket, wrapper intact, through two more days of wear, packing, a plane ride inside my carry-on bag, and five more days home. It was one millimeter thick; I had to scrape it off the cardboard tray with my teeth because it melted instantly to the touch. It was good. Tags: las_vegas
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When I was little we had a simple dice game called Bowl and Score. The game comprises ten six-sided dice with a bowling printed on one face of each. The dice are treated like bowling pins: roll the ten dice, and those with the pin side up are “left” after the first ball. These are thrown a second time for the spare shot. The dice are thrown in the same way for every frame of a standard game of bowling, including extra rolls as needed in the tenth frame. Scoring is exactly as in real bowling. You’ll notice, right off, that Bowl and Score offers exactly zero strategy. Indeed, it didn’t hold my interest all that long, even though as a kid I was nuts about bowling. But I recently got to thinking: just how good a bowler is Bowl and Score? Better than I? You could find Bowl and Score’s average to a reasonable degree of accuracy by rolling a few hundred games and taking the mean of the results. But to a statistician, just finding the average isn’t enough. To really understand the game, you need to characterize it completely, by finding the full probability distribution: the likelihood of every possible score, between 0 and 300. Working out all the probabilities mathematically is straightforward in theory but very, very tedious in practice. (How many ways are there to score, say, 157? Care to enumerate all of them?) It’s much easier to approximate the probability distribution by sampling. Thanks to modern computers, random numbers are available in bulk. If we simulate enough games we can approximate the true distribution as closely as we wish, constrained only by the number of CPU hours we can stand to invest. Last night, after drinking a little too much Dr. Pepper, I decided to program a Bowl and Score simulator and see what it would tell me. Bowl and Score was easy enough to implement. Using the statistical programming language R, I wrote the algorithm in only ten minutes, and simulated 100,000 games of bowling in another ten, on my not-too-new desktop PC. Below is a histogram of the results. ( Cut for illustrations…Collapse )Tags: bowling, games
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(that’s “40”, and not “extra large”) In defiance of every law of the universe, we had really nice weather for both Christmas and Boxing Day: clear skies, high in the mid 40s, and barely a breeze. It was a cinch, therefore, to see Monday’s two-day sliver moon, with an already blazing Venus (though less than half as luminous as it will be in a few months!) perfectly even with it to the south. Coming only four days after the solstice, it was the most southerly sliver moon I’ve seen since I started keeping track, and perhaps of all time. Keep a lookout after sunset on January 2, when a waxing gibbous moon will pass quite close to Jupiter. Mighty Jupiter is well past its brightest point for this year, but at magnitude –2.3, it is still by far the most commanding object in the sky besides the Moon, once Venus sets. Tags: sliver_moon
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Shortly before we moved from Salt Lake City to Seattle, circa 1997, we, the brother and his girlfriend paid a farewell visit to the 49th Street Galleria, a teenager’s paradise encased in a futuristic glass building. Under its roof were a bowling alley, huge Chuck E. Cheese-style video arcade with Skee Ball and other ticket-dispensing games as well as a vast array of video games, two miniature golf courses and a Laser Tag arena. It also had the largest parking lot in the state. Part of the excitement of going to the Galleria was the approach: a special drive looped around from the main road, and you’d enter the vast expanse of parking lot from below, and as you drove nearer, the majesty of the Galleria’s sparkling towers would slowly rise above the earth’s curvature. As it happened, we didn’t see the last part, because an attendant met us at the parking lot entrance, bearing effusive apologies and coupons. Apparently, some rich kid had rented the entire place out for the night. Curses! When we got home we actually looked at the coupons we’d been handed. Wow—they were good. Free round of miniature golf, free video game tokens, and even free laser tag! If I’d known about this before, I’d have tried to find a way to determine when the place was rented out, and deliberately visit right then just to reap the wizard coupon deal. A week or two later we visited again, actually got in, and cashed in all our free games. I wouldn’t pay money to play laser tag, but it was surprisingly fun—even if we were by fifteen years the oldest people on either team. But the most memorable part of the evening, by far, was our encounter with a ticket arcade game I haven’t seen before or since. It was basically roulette for kids: a wheel, divided unequally into five colored wedges, spun like mad and a rubber ball gradually spun down from the edge and came to rest on one of the colors. It had an incredibly mesmerizing attract mode. We just watched and grooved out for at least fifteen minutes. We don't actually know how long for sure, because we lost all sense of time. Here's what it did: when the wheel spun up for a new round the game played a frenetic melody, rich in counterpoint and semi-percussive lines, while the machine entreated, “Pick your color! Pick your color!” Traces of light chased each other around the perimeter. The buttons flashed hypnotically. This sensory overload continued until the ball rolled came to rest. Then everything stopped as the machine announced which color won. “Tickets for Green!” It sounded so goshdarn earnest. I could never be as happy about winning tickets as the game was about awarding them. Green, occupying about a third of the wheel, won a lot: say, about a third of the time. Less often, we heard about tickets for red, blue or yellow. One time the ball miraculously landed in the hair-thin strip of white, and for some reason it said, “Tickets for Blank!” We never actually played the game. It was fun enough just watching it spin and announce the (theoretical) winner. We all went home with that phenomenally catchy music running through our heads on repeat mode. For about two weeks afterwards, I would spontaneously break out with “Dun, dun, dun, da-gah-da-gah, dun, ga-da-gah-dun, dun, dun…” every couple of hours. I suspect my company was not appreciated by my friends and coworkers.
In the fifteen years since, I have seen the color roulette game only once, and the sound didn’t seem to be working. Sigh. Recently, I got to thinking about it again, and I reached that particular threshold of nostalgia that finally spurred me to try and find out, once and for all, what the damn game was called. That proved harder than I expected. I had no success at all until I discovered the term “ticket redemption game.” After that, it was straightforward: two clicks brought me to a distributor who had a vast, alphabetical list of every such device imaginable. I started in at A and systematically plowed through the list. Got lucky—the game is called Colorama. (If it were named Zzizzarama I’d still be looking.) A couple more clicks and I found this video of the attract mode in action. (This unit is the two-player version. The one at the 49th Street Galleria had four or five stations completely encircling the wheel.) The sound here completely fails to do justice to the frenetic harmonies. In fact, that’s probably a good thing. In the September 2000 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction there appeared a two-page article, called “comp.basilisk FAQ”, from an imaginary Usenet newsgroup (anybody else remember those?) about “basilisk images”, “unthinkable” graphical designs that can lock up the viewer’s mind, with deadly results. Only 800 words long, it’s one of the most thought-provoking science fiction stories I’ve read, and one of the very best from the eight years I subscribed to Asimov’s and Analog. I’m delighted to report that it is available on the Web, here. Apparently, some basilisk images, when sufficiently distorted, can be viewed safely—kind of like the German version of the world’s funniest joke. In the same vein, the poor sound quality of the Colorama video attenuates the game’s weapons-grade earworm, so you can safely watch it and not be singing the tune in your mind for the next five weeks. (It didn’t work for me because I’d already been sensitized by the 49th Street Galleria unit. Again, I have the feeling that my coworkers are annoyed with me.) Something else I forgot about: when the music starts up again, the first two beats sound rushed. Not sure why. Perhaps the first note is late. Another Colorama video features Tickets for Blue and Red, plus tickets being dispensed for far too long. It didn’t occur to me how much the Colorama wheel looks like a washing machine until I read the second comment. Colorama may have started life as a real roulette wheel. Here, we see an ancient, five-player Colorama that pays out real money. And it costs only 2p a whirl. From the fonts I’d guess that this machine dates back to the early 1980s. Tags: nostalgia
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Odd how some things that once absorbed a lot of our personal CPU cycles can lie there in our unconscious memory for decades, until some random happenstance brings them back, front and center. Continuum was one of my favorite games for the auld Macintosh Plus—but I’d completely forgotten about until I found it by accident in the game archives the brother kindly sent me along with the Mini vMac emulator. If it hadn’t been on the same (virtual) floppy disk as Cap’n Magneto 1, I’d probably have never found it, because the name had also totally slipped my mind. I launched Continuum out of curiosity—to see whether it was something I’d recognize. And of course, within the last three months I’ve played enough to have gained back most of my formaer skill. 2Continuum is credited to “the Wilson Brothers.” One of the authors, Brian Wilson (no, not that one), has written a Web page about the game’s history. Continuum is clearly inspired by the 1982 Atari game Gravitar (you can play it and several other classic Atari games on line, via the link), but is superior to Gravitar in every respect. The graphics are far better (for which Atari can’t really be faulted) and the difficulty ramps up at just about the right pace. ( Continue for pictures…Collapse )Tags: nostalgia, old_mac
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[ Crossposted to  exmormon] It’s been quite a while since I last posted a Playelder story, and I hadn’t thought of him in ages, but a friend’s picture on Facebook, of her dressed up like a sexy missionary(!), reminded me of my ongoing Playelder restoration project. Playelder, a onetime Mormon missionary and all-around hilarious storyteller, rocked the “Recovery from Mormonism” message board with his tales of life in the capital-C Church. (More background on Playelder may be found here.) In tonight’s episode, Player recalls his first encounter with “Satanic” music, in the early 1980s. (As before, I have cleaned up the formatting and spelling, and have added footnotes for the benefit of those who’ve had little exposure to Mormondom, but have left the essence untouched.) Apples, Onions and Iron MaidenPosted by Playelder on December 15, 1998 at 14:17:00I have nothing constructive, intelligent, or well thought out to add here. Just a stupid story. As a child it was always a source of extreme embarrassment that I was an expert on music. And not the cool kind that my ultra-chic and -hip friends listened to. No, unfortunately I was an expert on the Golden Oldies and all that Happy Days sock-hop stuff that makes your parents get that wistful look in their eyes as they long to recapture the days of their carefree youth before you ever came along, a twisted wretched result of one night at Inspiration Point in their dad’s ’57 Chevy. And he wasn’t pissed at them so much as because of what they did together, but what they did to the shocks in the Chevy as they did what they did together. Whenever they got that look, I knew that it was time to jet that joint lest I see the dancing, snuggling, necking, petting, and conception of yet another sibling. My parents had an extremely large collection of their “real music” and I was subjected to it at such a regular basis that I might as well have been raised at Arnold’s. Except there was no cool guy like The Fonz there to teach me how to score on chicks. I knew every song from the golden age of rock and roll and who sung it. I could, and did, sing along to every one of those K-Tel and Ronco Records Presents ads. Buddy Holly, Chubby Checker, Elvis the King, and the older stuff like Patti Paige and Jerry Vail. Let’s not even get into Glenn Miller and Spike and his orchestra. I’m having wicked flashbacks that would rival those of any Vietnam vet. ( Continued behind the cut…Collapse )Tags: playelder
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Risk is just about the perfect example of a board game made vastly more enjoyable on the computer. Now, I enjoy rolling dice—games like Can’t Stop are among my favorites—but until I acquire a vast amount of free time I don’t know what to do with, I’d rather not invest the couple of days needed to play a full game of Risk in vivo. I’ve only played one real game of Risk, and got bored so quickly that I amused myself by concentrating all my forces in a single country, and then in one turn blazing a merry path of destruction across most of Asia, killing off every single one of my armies along the way. Naturally, I was eliminated before my next turn came ’round, but since that was my exact goal in the first place, I didn’t exactly mind. I learned to appreciate Risk by playing the game on my Macintosh Plus, yonks ago, while I was trying to stay sane in medical school. The implementation for the Mac was written by Tone Engel in 1986, and can still be played (with a slight modification by Richard Loxley) under the Mini vMac emulator. This version could play up to six live or computerized players. Three types of computer players were available: aggressive (marked by the male symbol, ♂), neutral (+, presumably representing Switzerland) and inconsistent (*!?, randomly alternating between aggressive and neutral). Aggressive opponents were pretty easy to beat: they tended to overextend themselves, going for more territory rather than fortifying gains against a counterattack, and they didn’t seem to understand the advantage of conquering whole continents. The neutral opponents, on the other hand, were deceptively tough to beat. They calmly built up their forces until attacked; then they threw everything they had at their aggressor until they’d recovered their lost territory. That might not sound too bad, but two or more neutrals appeared to form temporary alliances against a human player: neutrals could capture each other’s territory, on the way to punishing the human, without provoking a retaliatory strike. In my prime I could beat five neutrals simultaneously, but only if I could capture Australia or South America right away, and built up my forces while my opponents expended their armies on each other trying to get to me. But the most fun I had playing Risk—and the reason I’m writing this down—was a little game I called “Armageddon Risk”: Good against Evil, with the entire world at stake. Armageddon Risk began with two aggressive computer players, called (of course) Good and Evil. ( Cut for pictures...Collapse )Tags: old_mac
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I haven’t done one of these in a long time. The following vignettes go back all the way to April.
There are lots of people who consider themselves “old” who yet were born in the age of microwave popcorn. I maintain you can’t really consider yourself old unless you’ve cooked Jiffy Pop on the stove. It was a solemn ritual: the parents would deploy a pie-pan-shaped container of Jiffy Pop, give it to us kids, and leave us to it. Gleefully we cranked up the nearest heating element to “Nuclear,” and started shuffling the Jiffy Pop back and forth on top of it so that it would warm evenly, using the metal (!!) handle provided for this purpose. But this was forty years ago, so the stove took forever to heat up, and we invariably got bored waiting for it; we’d leave the Jiffy Pop on the stove and walk off to watch TV, vowing to be back “in just a minute.” And without fail, the black smoke pouring out of the kitchen would call us back to the kitchen. In this respect, Jiffy Pop is exactly the same as today’s microwave popcorn. Only after we’d controlled the blaze would the grownups show up to find out what was going on. (And yet we survived.) What impressed me about Jiffy Pop, though, was that foil top that billowed outward as the kernels popped. Pretty ingenious technology for the 1960s. I like to think it was a spinoff of the Apollo project.
My local 7-Eleven has a big sign in the window reading “Check Out Our Low Tobacco Prices!” Do they really think it’ll change anything? About 97% of people who get close enough to read the sign are going there to get tobacco in the first place. It’s about as big a game-changer as the DMV advertising “Check Out Our Long Lines!” That store makes about 60% of its non-lottery revenue from tobacco—the other 40% coming from malt liquor and Wild Irish Rose.
Whenever I go to a picnic I make sure to bring two kinds of snacks: a longtime favorite and something I’ve never had before that looks intriguing. That way, if I don’t like the second one I can just “forget” it and leave it there. My trial snack for Memorial Day was this month’s weird, experimental Doritos: Pizza Supreme. They were okay, but oregano and corn chip are two flavors that will never feel quite comfortable in each other’s presence.
What’s up with that ultra-stinky mulch that people make flowerbeds out of? It must be fantastic at encouraging plants to grow if expert gardeners are willing to put up with that stench. I just hope that before I retire, and am obliged to take up gardening as a hobby, some genius develops a substitute that has all the beneficial properties without smelling like lion shit.
A while back we received an invitation to a wedding that began “We request the honor of your presence….” At first glance I though it read “We request the honor of your pancreas….” As it happened, I was able to provide both. But I wouldn’t for just anybody.Tags: nostalgia, random_shit
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I used to think that Las Vegas was the seat of materialism in America. But I just spent a couple of days in Orlando, and I was enlightened. Every one of the 157 children on my flight out of Orlando carried on a pink or lavender roller bag chock full of Disney crap. Consequently, we took about 20 min longer than usual to board, and the last couple of dozen poor suckers on the airplane had to check their carry-ons. The theme parks loom large over everything in the city. My hotel was pretty close to Universal, so that place managed to out-shout Disney in the local area, but of course most everywhere else it was Disney, Disney, Disney. Better be good—Mickey Mouse is watching you. And, occasionally, Donald Duck. Strangely, I could see no fewer than four amusement parks from my hotel window, not one of which I’d ever heard of, except for the Wet ’n’ Wild (which was open despite daytime temperatures barely reaching 70 °F). The others all looked like fly-by-night operations, fairground carnivals taken root under the benevolent Florida sun. Also I could count six cheap-ass steakhouses within a mile of my hotel, just in one direction. They outnumbered the family restaurants, in a legendarily family-friendly town. If I hear anyone complain about the way Southwest handles boarding, I can now point them to how USAir does it, which is even weirder. They board by “zones,” which at first made sense to me, since I assumed that each zone was a range of row numbers, and they filled the cabin from the back forward, as usual. But when I stepped on I had to stand around while a big mass of people seated ahead of me got all their stuff sorted out and sat down. The previous “zones” were a patchwork of seats on alternate sides of the airplane from front to back. Now perhaps there is some statistical justification for this; I can imagine how seating one side only at a time makes stowing bags easier. But if there is, it certainly didn’t work the way it was supposed to on this flight: for half an hour, the entire cabin was a maelstrom of grunting, flailing passengers trying to get around each other and wedge their bags into the overhead compartments. That may not have been the seating plan’s fault, though, because exactly the same thing happened on arrival.
A major paradox of giving presentations at scientific meetings is that a seven-minute talk requires considerably more effort to prepare than a 45-minute talk. The big challenge is to compact enough material into seven minutes to actually convey a significant amount of information—and that means making every spoken word count. I’m still not good enough at public speaking to do this on the fly, and the only way I can achieve it is to memorize my speech, word for word. This weekend’s talk was even worse because I was speaking to an audience of ophthalmologists who knew (a) nothing about genetics and (b) far, far more than I about the eye diseases we’re studying. Hence, I was almost guaranteed to flub any question they tossed at me; but here I was spared somewhat because the acoustics in the room were so bad I couldn’t understand a single word said by anyone from the audience. And of course the first one (after the moderator kindly interpreted for me) was: “What are we, as clinicians, supposed to take away from this?” Well, if I knew that, we’d have a patent on it by now. Nobody else got sweeping, general questions like that; it was always a clarification on a minor issue with the procedure, or some rambling commentary that took up the entire Q & A portion of the presentation. Lucky everyone else, sigh. The reception after the day’s symposium was worse, in a way. Of several hundred conventioneers, I knew one other person there—my semi-boss. In the brother’s terminology, I was the Bakesesh Dude—a name whose derivation won’t be made any clearer if I tried to explain, so I won’t. The Bakesesh Dude is the one person at a party who knows exactly one other person there. There is always one, and only one, Bakesesh Dude at any given celebration, and this reception was no exception. But the wonderful sesame-and-caraway-seed crackers and the brilliantly sunny, 65 °F afternoon out by the swimming pool made the reception worthwhile. You can see where my priorities lie; nobody who knows me well would ever mistake me for a “people person.” However, I do very well in a group of two*. I guess you could call me a “ person person.” ______________
*To be precise, my ability to deal well with crowds decreases in proportion to the factorial of the number of other people present.Tags: meeting
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When I was little we had an old children’s book called The Bumper Book. I hadn’t thought of it in ages, but recently I was looking through Kathy’s impressive collection of children’s literature from the 1960s and before, and it occurred to me that The Bumper Book would make a fine addition. It properly belonged to  kayigo—it was her third birthday present—but she kindly agreed to donate it to our library. I read it for the first time in over 30 years. All I remembered about it was that it was aimed at little kids: Dr. Seuss age or just a bit older. Otherwise, I didn’t know what to expect—but even if I had, I would have been wrong. Surprised, and amused, I wrote the following review.
The Bumper Book, a collection of poems, songs and fables, is a wonderful example of mid-20th-century Americana. (Our copy was printed in 1961, and by then it was already touted as a “classic.”) I remember enjoying these stories as a child, and not thinking that anything was unusual about them, but as a 21st-century adult, I find the anachronisms more entertaining than the vignettes themselves. The first thing a modern reader will notice, to quote Mystery Science Theater 3000, is that “America sure was a lot whiter back then.” Dozens of all-American boys and girls are pictured here, and they all look like they’ve just hopped off a boat from Sweden. (They dress like they’re from Sweden, too.) Nothing but rosy cheeks and transparent skin as far as they eye can see. Good thing all the scenes are set in the Midwest—the Arizona sun would have burnt these youngsters to a crisp in about thirty sizzling seconds. Let's look closer at a few of the tales. In “We Won’t Tell,” we read how a budding farmer fails to get the message that if you plant a cabbage patch next door to a huge rabbit colony, you’d better set a 24-hour guard on that thing. We can watch Edward Lear rhyme himself into a corner in “A Nonsense Alphabet”. The verse structure for each letter is like this: F was once a little fish,
Fishy, Wishy, Swishy, Fishy,
In a dishy, Little fish! All goes well right up until the letter Z. (In case you’re wondering, X was once a great King Xerxes—Xerxy, Perxy, Turxy, Xerxy.) Now the obvious thing for the letter Z to have once been was a zebra; but you can’t go rhyming zebra in the same manner without sounding all Russian—and Good Little American Boys and Girls never imitiate filthy Commies. Thus, we must resort to “Z was once a piece of zinc….” Of course, it’s impossible to draw a cute piece of zinc, so the illustrator added an adorable little mouse hiding behind it—perhaps he’s using it as a lean-to. I’ll give Mr. Lear a break on this one: in those post-Sputnik days, it was never to early to begin teaching your future rocket scientists about metallurgy. Next, we listen to Christopher Robin saying his prayers, blessing his family, the servants and himself—because, it goes without saying, all Good Little American Boys and Girls are also Christian ( real Christians, and not those idolatrous Papists). And rich enough to bestow their second-tier blessings on “the help.” But the story that made the biggest impression on “grownup” me told the valuable lesson of “Little-Boy-Who-Was-Too-Thin.” This poor, sticklike child was “ten pounds underweight,” and so lacked the essential fat reserves all kids need to climb trees and “throw a ball fast and high.” You see, in those days, it was believed that muscle couldn’t work properly unless it was sheathed within a two-inch layer of Crisco. Ostracized by the school nurse and all his classmates, LBWWTT takes a straw poll of all the animals in the farmyard to find out how he can fatten up and once again be accepted into polite society. Bunny Rabbit and Pudgy Pig and Dumpy Duck all provide a grocery list of their favorite meals, provided early and often by their benefactor, Farmer Brown (yes, that’s really his name). Alas, neither LBWWTT nor his plump advisors ever think to wonder why Farmer Brown was so generous with the slops. LBWWTT has one more interview, with Dimply Dot, the girl next door. "How did you get so delectably obese?", he asks. Inexplicably, instead of slapping LBWWTT hard enough to send him into orbit, Dimply Dot smiled a dimply smile at him. She ran a little race with herself, and she danced a little dance with herself, and then she stopped with a hop and a jump in front of Little-Boy-Who-Was-Too-Thin. “Bread and butter and cereal, and soup, and cocoa,” said Dimply Dot, “and I run and play in the sunshine every day.” Somebody better check Dot’s cocoa—sounds like she’s spiking her hot chocolate with a quadruple shot of espresso. Or perhaps a little nose candy. Armed with a literal cornucopia of nutritional advice, LBWWTT (we never learn his real name) marches home and goes on a binge that would land any modern child in a program for eating disorders. A few days later—behold! Little-Boy-Who-Was-Too-Thin is not only was the heftiest kid in class, but somehow also the strongest and fastest. Take-home message: Fat is simply a more easily acquired form of muscle.* In summary, I have an odd fondness for products that show off the innocence of ages past, and this one’s a beaut. I’m giving The Bumper Book a mere three stars because I don’t recommend it for modern-day children; my actual enjoyment of the work measures closer to four stars. ______________________
*I suspect the real subtext here was that obesity was still considered a status symbol—a holdover from the bad old days when being rich meant having enough to eat. Perhaps extreme slenderness was also shunned because really skinny children were particularly apt to die off of tuberculosis and heart defects and other nasty diseases.
The great irony here is that according to the pictures, even the properly “fat” children are all of perfectly healthy weight. Compared to today’s corpulent youngsters, they would look like the stick men LBWWTT was accused of resembling. But those poor, backwards 20th-century folk knew nothing about how to properly pack on the pounds. Since the nearest McDonald’s was probably four counties away, the best that Little-Boy-Who-Was-Too-Thin could manage was milk and cocoa, bread and butter, cornmeal mush, fruit and vegetables, and playing in the sunshine.Tags: book_review, childhood
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Just before I started medical school, I bought a Macintosh Plus. It was the best possession I’ve ever owned, including all my other computers to date (I’m on my fifth, 23 years later). Each new computer I’ve bought was more than ten times powerful than the last, but somehow less amazingly cool and magical. The Mac Plus kept me sane through my one year of medical school. While I was visiting my family in Utah a couple months ago, the brother gave me a Macintosh Plus emulator, called Mini vMac, and a whole raft of games, and since then I’ve been floating neck-deep in a sea of nostalgia. Here’s a semi-pictorial essay about Toxic Ravine—one of my very favorite games for the Mac Plus. (Warning: I may also cover one or two other notable games later on, just for posterity.) The game has a perfunctory Wikipedia entry, and a couple Mac reference sites mention it, but nowhere on the Web could I find a review that does justice to the game’s wonderfulness.
Your goal in Toxic Ravine is to clean out a canyon full of toxic waste, including discarded genetic experiments, and save the little genetically-engineered people trapped there. The people are called PANG Clones because they carry a recombinant Politeness And Niceness Gene, and they’re the most annoying creatures in the universe. Cloyingly cute and friendly, they’re like the biotech equivalent of Anne Geddes photos. You pilot a dirigible, as an employee of Orlando Poon, Jr.’s Cleanup and Rescue Service, from which you destroy toxic objects and rescue the PANG Clones. You are armed with a rescue robot, an endless supply of bombs, and a few airborne “smart bombs” you can control. I really like this guy’s smirk on the title screen. Is he Orlando Poon, or the player? Also chuckleworthy is the “Poon” menu—an unhelpful and vaguely suggestive name. ( Pictures ahead…Collapse )Tags: nostalgia, old_mac
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It’s bowling season again! Still smarting from our misadventure with the evil hippopotamuses, we made a pact during the summer that our continuing in our previous league would depend on that team’s absence. (They claimed last spring that they were leaving the league.) We showed up the first night of the new season, and—nobody else was there. Our start had been postponed by two weeks, and for some reason, every team in the league had been notified except us. Incensed, I was ready to quit right there, but agreed to give the officers one more chance. I drove in on the real first night and saw my teammates huddled in the parking lot. Not good, I thought. The reason soon became apparent: in the doorway, puffing away as if his life depended on it, slouched the most evil of the evil hippos, wreathed in clouds of cigarette smoke. (He has the skinny, sallow look of a lifelong chain smoker who hasn’t actually tasted food since the Carter administration.) Luckily, we found another league that had an opening and that would let us make up the first week. Our new bowling alley is much closer to our “center of gravity”—my drive is a bit longer, but everyone else’s is much shorter—so we’re already better off, before we even start. This afternoon we bowled our makeup games. We’d been warned that Saturday afternoon was birthday-party time, but I didn’t think much of it: I grew up bowling in junior leagues full of crazy-ass kids tripping on sugared cereals and Sunday morning cartoons, so as long as we had a couple of empty lanes of buffer, I figured we’d be okay. I was unprepared for the reality. The kids themselves were not the problem. They were out there somewhere, but I didn’t notice them. Couldn’t notice them. Because they were bowling in a cheap disco. At the far end of the lanes wes a series of huge TV screens, one right after the other, each three lanes (about 15 feet) wide. They alternated between some football game and fluff-pop music videos. And the music was deafening. 1 Have you ever been in a bowling alley with more than half the lanes going and couldn’t hear the pins fall? Fortunately the bass wasn’t pumped as much as usual, else the concussion would have knocked us back into the parking lot. The house lights were down, and everyone’s white clothing was glowing blue-violet. In two hours, the ubiquitous black lights finally did what two months of Midwest sunshine never could manage: they gave me a suntan on my freshly shaved scalp. Each lane had a ghostly blue runway pattern superimposed upon the wood. That was actually kind of cool, but it made seeing the arrows nearly impossible. (I originally thought the runway was shone on the lanes by UV light shining through a cutout, but on closer inspection it turned out it was painted on the lane with some fluorescent chemical. I’ll be interested to see whether it’s visible when the regular lights are on.) Here’s what gets me. Two things, really. If you’re going to fork over a huge wad of cash to go bowling, wouldn’t you want to, you know, experience it? The rumble of the ball traveling down the lane, and the crash of a perfect pocket hit? The suspense as the ball teeters at the edge of the gutter as it approaches the 10-pin? Forget about hearing the pins—even watching the pins took incredible effort, what with all the adolescent video going on four feet above in ADHD-TV. How could you even pick out what was happening to the pins against this sensory onslaught? Or have today’s Americans become so inured to the presence of music and television that they instinctively block it from hearing and view, respectively? And if so, why have it in the first place? Especially at such in-your-face intensity? Second: An entire generation of people may be learning to expect that this is what bowling is. I certainly hope not, because it’s not the way to get anyone interested in leagues, or real bowling in general. It's bad enough that hardly anyone knows how to score anymore—don't even get me started on that. Anyway—to my great surprise, I averaged 195 for the series, bowling by radar—well above my average from last year. Perhaps the complete lack of visual and auditory cues made me use the Force. As Obi-wan Kenobi said, “Your senses deceive you—don’t trust them.” Despite this start, I’m eagerly anticipating the league proper. The sister-in-law assured me that it is written into the league’s contract that the music will be off while we’re bowling. And that makes me happy, cool blue runways notwithstanding. _________________
1For the first time, I actually heard a Justin Bieber song and realized that’s what it was. I now understand why Auto-Tune is so widely despised (though I had already suspected it, courtesy of Rebecca Black).Tags: bowling, rant
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