I saw Bowling for Columbine for the first time today. It’s in my top ten or twenty favorite films of all time. Michael Moore is a big guy, but his balls are outsized even for his frame. The portion where he stands up to Charlton Heston was really uncomfortable. I have no idea how he did it.

Tom Mauser is my new personal hero.

Niall, my boy who just turned one, was practicing spatial skills today. He likes to take objects and pack them in containers, and to unpack containers. There was an empty half-liter plastic water bottle on the coffee table and a large plastic iced tea glass, and he was holding on to the former and trying to fit it into the latter, but he was trying to put it in sideways. I worked with him on it for a while and showed him how to insert it so it fit. Then we turned it into a game. He would take the bottle out of the glass, turn it around 180 degrees, then reinsert it. Then we would clap together and I would praise him.

We did this probably twenty times, as I was calling to Jenn to come in and witness it. She did get to see it, and she started playing the game with him. He played successfully for a couple turns, then seemed to forget the trick and tried reinserting it sideways. One time he tried putting it in, then pressed really, really hard to get it to go in, then lost hold of it and it skittered across the table. He looked up at me expectantly and started clapping. It was the funniest thing, as it looked like he was trying to pull a fast one — “Now we clap, right?”

It was a lot of fun. For a while he was trying to hold both pieces to do the insertion, but his arms aren’t long enough to hold the glass away from his body sufficiently, so he looked at me and very clearly, through body language, asked me to hold the glass for him. It’s amazing how much can be communicated and learned without spoken language.

A week ago this past Wednesday, September 29th, I went to my doctor for a routine visit. While he was writing a prescription, I asked him if he’d look in my ear when he was done, “because I’ll forget if I don’t ask you now.” That sentiment would grow to be fairly amusing, the fact that there was a point where I could forget my ear pain. That looks pretty melodramatic on preview, but trust me, it gets better.

He looked in my ear, and told me I had both a middle and external ear infection. He complimented me, remarking that it was quite a feat to pull off both at the same time. He prescribed Amoxicillin for the middle ear infection and Floxin drops for the external ear infection.

By Friday it had gotten pretty uncomfortable. By Saturday it was really bad. I called my doctor’s switchboard, but he was not on call, and I got connected to a really stuffy and dismissive doctor who assured me that Amox was strong enough and to give it a few more days. The next day, Sunday, it was unbearable. I was popping Percocet all day (that was Niall’s birthday.) Immediately after the cake I had to go in the other room and sleep. I called my doctor’s switchboard back, hoping he’d be back on call. He wasn’t, but a third doctor was — for the next twenty minutes, then the dismissive doc would be back. This third doctor was great. When I described the infection she was very concerned and called in Cipro, which I picked up.

I missed work on Monday, loaded up on Percocet. I was out of sick days, so I took a vacation day now that my workplace has become fairly, let’s say, particular about handing out sick days. On Tuesday it was still bad, but I had to go back to work. I called my doctor to ask for a referral to an ENT specialist, and was told that I could self-refer with my insurance. On Wednesday, I saw the specialist. He took one look at my ear and said, and I quote, “You have a terrible ear infection.” He told me to stay on the Cipro but that I could discontinue the Floxin, as the external ear infection had cleared up. He told me that there was lots of infected pus behind my eardrum, and that when the infection had cleared up, I would be left with lots of uninfected pus behind my eardrum, and that my hearing attenuation (about 60% loss of hearing) would last for weeks. He said that the only thing I could do to speed that up would be to “drain” it.

Now, when I was a kid in Japan I used to get terrible ear infections. On one doctor’s visit, they lanced both of my eardrums. It was one of the three most painful times in my life, joining the time I had a stent in my ureter after kidney stone surgery and the time I plunged my hand through hot coals at a barbecue. I was not interested. He told me I could come in to see him as a “courtesy” on Friday, even though he normally did not see patients then.

Wednesday night I started getting a lot of drainage from the ear. Clear, slightly yellow watery discharge, and the most unbelievably foul-looking greenish-gray discharge the consistency of Dijon mustard. I told Jenn I though my eardrum had broken. Bless her heart, she didn’t believe me.

Today, Friday, I saw the ENT again.  And he told me that my eardrum had ruptured in two places. Apparently a dual rupture happens less than 1% of the time that the eardrum ruptures. One hole was half a millimeter in size, the other was small enough that he could only see it with the microscope that I believe he really enjoyed sticking down my ear. He explained that he never really got to see these ruptures, as they normally happened in children and they wouldn’t let him stick a microscope in their ears. He noted that my ear infection is “as bad as they get in an adult,” and was convinced I had contracted it from my infant son, even though my son hasn’t been sick and is almost never around other children.

He then proceeded to suck the foul stuff through the hole in my eardrum with a long vacuum. That was really loud and rather uncomfortable. He then prescribed Ciprodex drops, which consists of Cipro and a steroid. When I put the drops in, they go through the hole in my eardrum, which is the entire point — but I can taste them as they pour down my eustachian tube, which is a mind-blowing experience.

I’ve been given a “less than 10%” chance that I’ll have permanent hearing damage as a result. That’s still a pretty high threshold, as my boss noted, but my hearing’s already much, much better after having the stuff sucked out. As long as the hearing doesn’t get any worse, I could probably learn to live with this maybe 10% loss of hearing. But I hope it gets better; my hearing is very important to me.

I think I’m going to take it easy this weekend.

I received a junk fax today advertising an undervalued stock. The disclaimer at the bottom of the fax informed me that the company sending out the faxes had received $219,965 to produce and distribute the “newsletter”. Good grief. If it’s not making the spammers rich, it’s making the telcos and the USPS some nice money.

My wife and baby are back from twelve days’ vacation and they both remember me!

Mount St. Helens clears throat with steam eruption

Mount St. Helens belched a roiling plume of gray-white steam and ash Friday, more than a week after a flurry of earthquakes warned the volcano was reawakening [emphasis added].

I think David Ammons, Associated Press Writer is trying a bit too hard.

Virginia’s Alexandria Country Day School ran out of milk at lunch, so it served the “limeade” in the refrigerator to its elementary school students. Unfortunately it wasn’t “limeade”, it was “leftover margaritas”.

You may have a spare key for your Kryptonite-brand bike lock (or your automobile ignition, or your vending machine) in your pocket or purse.

It seems every year someone makes a statement about people not possibly needing the full extent of a new computing resources, but it always seems that needs grow to fill the void. So anybody want to play a game? Name an amount of storage that you think you will never need. I calculated it out, and NTSC-quality video of the entirety of your life would comfortably fit in a petabyte — that’s an application I could think of evolving, but it’s still not that resource-dependent, relatively speaking (modern hard disks, for instance, have a million times as much space as a floppy disk from 20 years ago. All we need is another factor of 10,000 or so.)

The total amount of information in the world was calculated some years ago to be 10,000 LOC, or 1 exabyte, or 1000 petabytes. So I cannot imagine needing more than 10 exa. What would I possibly do with all that storage? I don’t need full-motion video of the lives of everyone in the world. I don’t think, anyway. And aren’t network speeds supposed to reach the point where local storage becomes useless any day now?  (Prediction: it’s not going to happen.  Ever.)  So, 10 exa, that’s my number.

Processor speed, however, I cannot even imagine a number I couldn’t use. There are always mathematical applications that could grow to fill the need. That Sandia system can do 1.8 teraflops.  That’s not nearly enough.  I can see games eventually needing petaflop capabilities for rendering and physics models (I might actually turn into a video game player at that point.) But an exaflop: now really, what the heck would we use that for in our daily lives?

In the spirit of the Olympics that just ended; and all the concert recordings I’ve been listening to recently; and the comedy shows I listen to on my way to work: I want a ban on that whistle. You know, that one. The two-fingers-in-the-mouth high-pitched summon-the-neighborhood-dogs make-everyone’s-ears-hurt one. I don’t want it to be illegal.  That wouldn’t work, and I don’t want to restrict peoples’ liberties.  I want it to be impossible.  Just impossible.  I wish no one had ever invented that thing.

Pearl Jam. Queensrÿche, unplugged. Mudhoney headlining with David Cross. And all proceeds to help fund progressive political causes. Interested? Only catch is they’re on weeknights in Seattle, which is a long way from L.A. But if you’re in the area, go.  And let me know how it was.

I walked to the cashier’s office. It was a Friday, and on Friday the Americans go on safari, so they were queueing up for money. Kenyans were queueing up for money as well.

The lady who was banking the money spotted me. Her name was Lucy. She said to jump the queue. I got the money and went back to my office. All those people I left in the queue died, including the cashier.

Another Magic post.  Wow.  I’m completely flabbergasted, blown away, amazed, impressed, excited.  What a wonderful mechanic.  What a wonderful card. What creativity. And Mike didn’t even mention the best part, which is that the discard happens at instant speed, which is just what my multiplayer discard deck is missing, to the point that I was considering maindecking Vedalken Orrery. It will be a fun, challenging card to play, trying to keep track of what I’ve seen in my opponents’ hands to know if I can safely activate Nezumi Shortfang if I already have one flipped.

Follow?  I mean, if you play Magic, do you follow? Otherwise there’s really no chance you could follow, so go ahead and ignore the rest of this post. Here’s how it would play out: I’ve cast a Nezumi Shortfang and used it when my opponent has one card in his hand. The player discards that card, and I flip Nezumi Shortfang (if you haven’t followed the link to the card yet, do so now.) Then my opponent gets back to two cards in hand, and I have a second Nezumi Shortfang in play. What does my opponent now have in his hand? If he has an instant, I can activate the Rat, and in response he can cast the instant. Then when the Rat’s ability resolves, he’ll have one card in his hand, which he’ll discard. The Nezumi Shortfang will flip and become a second Stabwhisker the Odious (great name), but under the new Legends rule, both Stabwhiskers will die as a state-based effect. So for the cost of having his hand forced slightly, he’ll change my one-for-zero into a much more favorable (for him) two-for-two. So I’ll have to be really sure I keep track of what he’s holding, knowledge I should have received from Duresses and so forth. But what if he’s drawn a card or two that I haven’t seen yet? I’ll have to make a guess based on what he’s played so far: what are the instants he’s likely to be playing, and and what’s the likelihood of him holding one. Even if it’s a Giant Growth, it would probably behoove him to Giant Growth one of my creatures so that his hand can empty and the Rat can flip.

I watched Outfoxed today. Aargh. What a frustrating movie. It left me in a sour mood for the rest of the day. I have, however, come to the conclusion that Bill O’Reilly either needs to be somewhere where he can be taken care of and receive regular shots, or he needs to be somewhere where he can be taken care of and shot regularly.

Good grief.  What lousy news today.  Massacre in Russia, another massive hurricane, Bill Clinton sick.

And check this out: “Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual, I recognise now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did.” Sounds a hell of a lot like a confession to me. How could it have been consensual if she does not view it as such?  Wouldn’t she have to agree that it was consensual?  For it to be consensual, that is?

On a far lighter note, BBC World Service asked Claire Danes if it was difficult to portray a bad actor in her most recent role.

And what is Michael Biehn doing slumming?  He got $4 million for a John Landis movie.  He must have gotten more for the massively, almost unbelievably under-rated The Art of War, which I give 8.5 stars to (contrast with the 5.2 it gets on IMDB.) Maybe he just likes to get a paycheck while living in Hawaii. To be honest, I thought they’d kill him in the premiere, after I saw him in the commercial. Then they gave him a ringer credit (“…and Michael Biehn”) in the opening credits, and I thought, wouldn’t it be great if they gave him a proper listing as a star of the show and still killed him?

And what am I doing writing a blog post this banal?

Checking [whether] standard error [closed in a Perl script], though, is a bit more problematic. After all, if STDERR fails to close, what are you planning to do about it? — The Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition

They go on to suggest a couple of things, but it’s still a funny comment. By way of analogy, compare it to submitting a customer service request to a company saying that the customer service request system is not delivering any customer service requests.

On the very next page, it says “As of Perl v5.8 there is a way to mix [buffered and unbuffered I/O functions]: I/O layers. You can’t turn on buffering for the unbuffered functions, but you can turn off buffering for the unbuffered ones.” Great, really useful! I can turn off buffering on an unbuffered function and end up with: an unbuffered function! The presence of typos like this is really obnoxious, because when I find a confusing passage I have to wonder whether they are making a mistake or I’m just not understanding.

A follow-up to my car post of a few weeks ago. In summary, the Viking Insurance rep made an offer for settlement, and I suggested they double it. They’ve called back and have said, essentially, “O.K., we’ll double it.”

Oh, and Audi performed the repair job on my bumper, which ended up running to $2000, for free. I’ll be posting an open letter to Audi in the next week thanking them.

I’m thinking of writing a book called So Many Bunnies at the Scotch Whisky Distillery.  I’ve got the beginning worked out:

1 was named Ashton.  He slept in the mash tun.

2 was named Beryl.  She slept in a barrel.

3 was named Carol.  She slept in a barrel.

4 was named Darryl.  He slept in a barrel.

5 was named Errol.  He slept in a barrel.

There are a lot of barrels, you see.

OK, that’s a point-oh-one percenter.  The intersection of the set of scotch aficionados and the set of parents of infants.

We could go on. 16 could be Pete, who slept in the peat. 19 could be Sherry, whose butt slept in the sherry butt. And we could rewrite 4 to be “Daniel, who slept in the hogshead.”

OK, that’s a 1 x 10^-7 percenter.  I’ll stop now.

A gem:

Perhaps an analogy would be appropriate:

There is a competent and an incompetent way to rob a bank. You can either plan ahead, consider the worst-case scenario, and get in and out without too much trouble. Or you can dream about your successes, not consider difficult possibilities, and have the result be a violent, bloody mess.

Robbing a bank is still wrong, but pointing out that the robbers royally screwed up isn’t an endorsement of the rightness or wrongness of the act itself.

John Kerry: “I’m running for President to make the country we love safer, stronger, and more secure. I’m asking every American to be a Citizen Soldier…”

Oh, shut up.  Like what we need is another president who sees everything as a military conflict.

And try this: “John Kerry has the vision to create a new Manhattan Project to make America independent of Middle East oil in 10 years by creating alternative fuels like ethanol and making cars more efficient.”

Great, use the terminology of nuclear weaponry to discuss green ititiatives.

“John Ashcroft has launched an all-out assault on individual rights, allowing for a wholesale invasion of attorney-client conversations, e-mails and telephone calls. Immediately after the election, John Kerry will name a new Attorney General whose name is not John Ashcroft.  We will also fight to protect women’s rights, civil rights and workers rights and enforce anti-trust laws.”

Yeah, you know, that other stuff when we get around to it.  The important thing is just to have someone not named John Ashcroft.

“John Kerry supports expanding our nation’s hate crime law. He supports efforts to provide equal justice for all victims of hate violence, regardless of their race, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, gender or disability.”

A step-by-step analysis of the actual points, rather than the sloppy writing, on which I disagree with Kerry will have to wait until I have more time, but the author structures this paragraph as if B follows from A, which it most certainly does not. If anything they are incompatible, as “equal justice” is completely at odds with “special sentences for certain crimes”.

Trader Joe’s has a Zwack 3 year old plum brandy at 47% abv, distilled entirely from plums. It’s also Kosher, curiously. Apparently the Zwack distillery produces the self-proclaimed “national drink of Hungary”, Unicum. More here.

Pizza Hut: Helloandthankyoufuhcallingpeezahuthomeofthefourallwillthisbefordeliveryorcarryout?

Josh: Delivery.

P: Wouldyaliketohearourspecials?

J: Sure.

P: Twoonetoppingbuffalowingsnineteenninetynine.

J: What?

P: Twoonetoppingbuffalowingsnineteenninetynine.

J: One topping buffalo wings?

P: Twoonetoppingandbuffalowingsnineteenninetynine.

J: Oh.

I usually order online, but they have recently “improved” their web app to the point at which it is completely unusable.

During a group visit to Mt. Rushmore … we encountered … a white-robed, shaven-headed Hari Krishna with his literature. This was not in patriotic keeping of the site and everyone of our 26-persons was offended. … I am not critical of other religions, but [Mt. Rushmore] is not a proper place for propaganda. (emphasis added)  — H. R. Fischer

I’ve come up with a new delicacy.  It consists of french fries, gravy, and Beluga caviar.

I’m calling it Vladimir Poutine.

Jordon from The World of Stuff is craving links, so here is an (unrequested) link back to him.  He always has nice things to say about mcgees.org, so it’s really the least I could do.  Best of luck, Jordon.

This ViewSonic sucks.  I’m buying a new monitor.  A flat panel.  Today.  Or Friday.

All winter squashes are edible as summer squashes (shell and all) if they are picked young enough.  This squash

had turned green but had stopped growing, so I harvested it this morning at the size of a lemon and steamed it for 10 to 12 minutes. Here’s a picture:

It was delicious.

It feels like a cold, lonely, depressing Christmas at dawn, so well does Homicide set the scene.  I keep expecting frosty white light to be streaming through the windows, and I’m reaching for a blanket.

I was a bit skeptical, and … annoy[ed] at the possibility that the word bright would be used to imply that we are smarter than other people. Yet, reading some of the essays posted on the brights’ web site quickly changed my mind. After all, not all “gay” people are gay in the sense of being happy, easy-going fellows, right? — Massimo  Pigliucci

And I sigh.

Look, Massimo, Richard, Daniel: you’re not helping. I know you feel crapped upon — most atheists do — but we’re not going to increase tolerance and education by referring to ourselves as smarties or clevers, even if we were to contend that “by saying I’m a clever, I’m not saying I am clever.”  You cannot just hijack terms with unflattering antonyms because it makes you feel warm and fuzzy.  That just puts people on the defensive, and it’s frankly offensive.

There are two main reasons to adopt an umbrella term for people currently identifying as atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, secular humanists, and rationalists, and neither seem particularly beneficial. The more reasonable one is to promote a sense of self-identity, using a “positive” term (and I mean that both linguistically and approbationally.) I understand the draw of having a desirable term with which to self-label, but it seems clannish and petty. The second, worse reason seems to be apparent inflation of our ranks, trying to look like a larger minority, which is a bit sneaky.

Massimo Pigliucci and Daniel Dennett (they’re the less shrill ones, if you’re keep track) admitted wariness in initially embracing the term. Go with your instincts, guys.