Because I Never Remember to Save This

From xkcd

Found in Translation

You can do everything in Emacs, the One True Editor: read email, browse the web, check your calendar, play Conrad's Game of Life, talk to a shrink, oh, yeah, even edit files.

And now you can call up Google, Babelfish, or a couple of other translation services directly from an Emacs buffer. Load up babel.el, highlight a region, do

M-x babel-region

and your translation appears in another buffer.

Thanks to minor emacs wizardry for pointing this out.

Now if it just had a hook for Latin.

Battlestar Galactica: The Summary

After considering the body of work that is the remade Battlestar Galactica, I offer this summary:

Be kind to your sheet-metal friends,
For that toaster is somebody's mother,
We make them do all our hard jobs,
And program them so they can't sob.
Now you may think that they'll kill us all,

WELL THEY WILL!

The Back of the Ticket

From the back of the Washington Nationals Baseball ticket for May 15, 2009. Footnotes added.

By the use of this ticket, the ticket holder agrees that: (a) he or she shall not transmit or aid in transmitting any information about the game or related activities to which it grants admission,^a including, but not limited to,^b any account,^c description, picture,^d video,^e audio,^f reproduction^g or other information concerning the game or related activities^h (the Game Information); (b) the Club issuing the ticket is the exclusive owner of all copyrights and other proprietary rights in the game, related activities,ⁱ and Game Information; and (c) the participating Clubs, Major League Baseball Properties, Inc., Major League Baseball Enterprises, Inc., MLB Advanced Media, L.P. and each of their respective affiliates, licensees and agents shall have the perpetual^j and unrestricted right and license to use his or her name,^k image, likeness^l and/or voice^m in any broadcast, telecast, photograph, video and/or sound recordingⁿ taken in connection with the game for all purposes and in all media^o known and unknown^p throughout the universe.^q Breach of any of the above will automatically terminate this license and may result in further legal action.^r

^aSo if you sneak into the game, you can do any of these things?

^bDon't worry, we'll think of other things later

^cWhich is why I can't actually tell you about the game

^dNo snapping pictures with your cell phone

^eRemember Sonny ripping the film from the camera? Applies here, too.

^fThe cell phone conversation, where you called your wife to tell her the game was going into extra innings? Verboten

^gEven with sock puppets

^hSuch as the young woman bouncing up and down three rows in front of you

ⁱThis includes all bubble gum, sunflower seed shells, and tobacco wads spit out by players during the game

^jOne of the five people you meet in heaven will be an MLB Lawyer. Oh wait, if there's a lawyer there …

^krcjhawk will now forever be associated with the Washington National Baseball Club

^lWell, I don't suppose they'll be using my likeness, but that woman three rows down …

^mI have been told that I have a voice made for blogging.

ⁿWait! We left out Leroy Neiman pantings!!!

^oWhew. For a moment I'd thought we'd left a loophole.

^pJust in case sending pictures via DNA encoding ever becomes popular

^qAt least on Arcturus they don't complain about us calling our championship the World Series

^rA century from now, if we find you put a picture of this game in a scrapbook, we'll exhume your body, drag it to the site of the Spanking-Brand-New Washington Nationals of Boise Park, and cast it out through the front gate. Then we'll sue your heirs.

The World's Best Visual Illusions

Well, I'm not sure they're the best, but here are some really neat visual illusions, including why a curve ball appears to make a sudden break as it reaches the plate, when we know it's really making a smooth curve.

Preserving My Web History

Back at the dawn of the Internet I had a GeoCities Web Page. For its time, it was marvelous. All you had to do to keep up with the terms of service was to make sure each page had a link to the GeoCities home page, and upload files through a somewhat clunky web interface.

I haven't touched the thing since about 1997, but it's still up on the web.

Not for long, unfortunately. Yahoo, which bought the place in 1999, is boarding up the site sometime this fall.

So, for posterity, I've downloaded my contribution to early web culture and uploaded it to my current free web site. That I was able to do this tells you something about why GeoCities is about to go the way of Thylacinus cynocephalus: AwardSpace gives me free web space so long as I register my domain with them, with minimal restrictions, and I can manage it with standard ftp. All I have to do is remember to keep my domain registration active.

Looking back on the thing, the only part that might still be relevant are my book reviews, most of which I did as a paid-for-connect-time science advisor for GEnie. They aren't particularly dated, but I obviously needed an editor to go over them. I've also mis-remembered some of the reviews. For example, I was certain that my review of The Curse of the Bambino started with the line Red Sox fans whine a lot, but that turns out not to be the case. (And, the curse having been obliterated, this is the most dated of the reviews.)

Anyway, it's a new home for old web pages, at least until AwardSpace disappears, hopefully in the far, far future.

The Science Hodgepodge Archival Edition

The Weather Didn't Constantly Change — It Was Always Windy

Holyrood, Kansas, 9:00 am, April 2, 2009:

5:30 pm, April 2, 2009:

9:45 am, April 5, 2009:

1:20 pm, April 5, 2009:

Passing it On

The lyrics of Avenues and Alleyways, sung here by Tony Christie, make no sense until you're told that the opening instrumental and the final chorus (where the soul of a man is easy to buy ...) are the music from the opening and closing credits, respectively, of The Protectors, an early 70's British crime-fighting import staring Robert Vaughn and Nyree Dawn Porter. The only thing I really remember about the series was that Nyree Dawn Porter was in every episode.

Kids: Yes, we did really look and act like that. Someplace in your house are pictures of your mum and dad in this kind of clothes. Grab them. They'll come in handy when they threaten to change the will.

I stumbled on this a few days ago, and haven't been able to get the frakking song out of my head. I figure if I can pass it on to even one person, it will leave me alone.

Download Today's Sports

For years, The Sporting News was the bible of the Baseball world: complete records, weekly stats, team information, publishing yearly guides, rule books, etc. As a bonus, it would cover other sports as well, at least during baseball's off season.

Many of TSN's services have been replaced by such things as Retrosheet, the Emerald Guide, and, of course, the web sites of ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and even TSN's own site.

Trying to remain relevant while its popularity steadily declines, TSN has come out with Sporting News Today. If you are looking for investigative journalism, look elsewhere. SNT is a daily collection of articles, mostly from wire services, about what happened last night in sports. The four biggies (baseball, basketball, football and hockey), mostly, but other stories show up as well. At 40+ pages per day, it's the sports section your local paper never had, even when you had a local paper, and it had a sports section. For those of us far way from home, it's a godsend.

You can read SNT on the web, but I've found the best viewing is with the PDF download. This is predictably named, so I wrote a short script to pull it off the web, open it up with my favorite PDF viewer, and erase itself when I'm done. Feel free to modify this as and where you will. (With a few obvious modifications, it's excellent for looking at many daily comic strips.)

#! /usr/bin/perl

# Should download PDF version of Sporting News Today
# You probably should register first

# Make sure everything goes on in /tmp:

chdir "/tmp" ;

# Find the date

$daystring = `date +"%m %d %Y"`;

chomp($daystring);

@date=split(" ",$daystring);

$m = $date[0];
$d = $date[1];
$y = $date[2];

$name="snt".$y.$m.$d."-dl.pdf";

$address="http://today.sportingnews.com/sportingnewstoday/".$y.$m.$d."/data/".$name;

# Get it:

system("wget $address");

# Read it, then erase it when you're done

system("xpdf /tmp/$name; rm /tmp/$name");

Snooping on Snopes

If you've ever been forwarded an email that says something like Bill Gates will give you $1,000,000,000,000 if you forward this to twenty-five people in the next 10 minutes, then you probably know that before you tell the sender what an idiot he/she is you should check it out first at Snopes.com.

If, however, you want to find out about the people behind Snopes, check out the article in Reader's Digest.

Just in Case You Are Still Naive Enough to Believe Your Secrets are Safe

Rodriguez, A., On the propensity for unfavorable information to leak even though they tell you that it will absolutely, positively, be destroyed, ESPN (2009).

Technical Difficulties

Those of you who occasionally look at my web space www.rcjhawk.us, will find that my domain has been replaced by another. That's because my provider, awardspace.com, neglected to tell me that the domain registration expired until a full two weeks after it actually expired. I've re-registered, hopefully the everything will be back to normal in a day or two.

Actually, it took about an hour. Everything is back in place.

How to Explain the Metric System to Americans

Because it's time for a change:

xkcd: 5 January 2009

(If part of the chart is hidden, or it's too small to see, click on it to get the full picture.)

The Twenty-First Century is When Everything Changes

OK, I'm about three years late finding this, but it's still cool:

Phobos and Deimos seen from the surface of Mars

Upgrading to Ubuntu Intrepid

I'm finally getting around to updating my Linux machines to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). It's not a complicated process, but I wanted to catalog all the steps, for future reference:

1. Back up anything on your machine you can't bear to lose. Don't assume that the upgrade will go painlessly, and none of your data will be lost. There is a technical name for people who believe that they don't need to back up data before updates: Fool.
2. OTOH, you don't need to back up your /usr, /bin, /etc, /lib etc. directories, unless you've tweaked them, because even if you hose your installation, when you install a new distribution you'll get all of that back.
3. Run sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade from the command line to be sure everything is up to date on your current system.
4. Since we're upgrading from Ubuntu 8.04, which has long term support, we need to explicitly tell the system that we want an update to a non-LTS release. Go to System ⇒ Administration ⇒ Software Sources, click on Update, and change the Release upgrade selection from Long term support releases only to Normal Releases.
5. Kill any processes you've got running in your own space: browser, mail client, emacs, etc.
6. Go to System ⇒ Administration ⇒ Update Manager. At the top of the window will be a button saying Upgrade. Ignore the Partial update warning messages.
7. Hit it.
8. The upgrade process takes some time. You need to check back once in a while, because there will be the occasional question to answer.
9. It took about 45 minutes via FIOS to download all of the update software.
10. Took about 5 hours to do all the updates on Hal. Probably way too much software installed. Next update I think I'll start from the CD and only install the software I really want.
11. It took another 30 minutes or so to remove old packages.
12. Glad I took the day off.
13. At the end, you'll probably get a message to the effect that some of your software couldn't be updated. This is third party Unfree software, such as Acrobat, RealPlayer, GoogleEarth, etc. If you're running a truly Free system you probably won't see this message. If you're running Free, though, you're probably running Debian, so you're not reading this. To update your Unfree software, go back to Software Sources, click Third-Party Software and change any lines that say hardy to intrepid. Click the repositories you want to enable (medibuntu for sure, canonical possibly).
14. Go back to the Update Manager and update your software. There will be updates, probably even if you aren't using the third-party software repositories. When that's done, before quiting, click Check, then update again if necessary. Repeat until your system is truly up-to-date.
15. Rebuild any software that depends on obsolete libraries. For example, SoX, which I like to build from source to do proper conversions to MP3 format as well as away from MP3 format. This is a good time to get the latest version of these codes.