Please fill out my polls: LJ Vices Poll, Austin Powers Poll, Beard Poll, Heinlein Poll, San Francisco Poll, Sea Shanty Poll, Tango Excuses Poll, Musical Dorkiness Poll, Characteristic Poll.

Now playing on mental radio:

So, ru_declarative?
Or have you ever been declarative?
Well, I have.
Here, let me prove it to you (declaratively)...

I just created declarative, for declarative programming languages such as Haskell, ML, Prolog etc. If you're interested in this, please join and tell all your friends.

Please vote for someone to be pope.

Poll #467435 Papal Election
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Eligo in Summum Pontificem

April Fool!

Somehow, I think Dark Lord Keith is going to be disappointed.

What happened to angilong?

Update: never mind, she's back.

I really don't think I can afford to go to Estonia in September.

Thank you, gaspaheangea, for alerting me to Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken. See also the PowerPoint presentation.

NBC is doing an American adaptation of The Office.

French Madrigal from Trader Joe's: a semi-hard cheese with a mild Edam-ish flavour and a slight nuttiness. Nothing spectacular, but quite edible.

Isle of Mull Cheddar from DeLaurentii's: a very mature cheddar with a dark dry complex flavour. Would go well with a glass of good port. Must Buy Port.

Beecher's Flagship from Larry's Market: an American-style cheddar with a sweet, rich, gently creamy flavour. Quite excellent.

Camembert "Le Rustique" from DeLaurentii's: a small round in a box with a clean well-proportioned flavour that gently and perfectly reveals the classic Camembert tang lingering long into aftertaste.

Yes, you can of course be black and plausibly claim to be from Guildford (even if you're not). Having an American accent, however, is another matter.

In SLC for the weekend. The rental company have given me a Mustang this time. It's such a teenager's car. When you put the accelerator down the engine makes an enormous roaring sound but doesn't actually accelerate any faster than my Saturn. On the other hand, it does have Sirius satellite radio, so I've been listening to the BBC World Service (available on short wave everywhere in the world except the U.S.). I've been wondering whether to get that for my own car just for that, though both Sirius and XM cost $12.95 a month.

I don't usually talk about this publicly, but I flirt with a lot of people and not all of them are on my friends list...

( If I've ever kissed you, )

For catamorphism (and others): Sex is for FAGS! Plus, see their sister site, Iron Hymen.

"SHA-1 has been broken. Not a reduced-round version. Not a simplified version. The real thing."

Update: more details

Looking at this, I can't help wondering: what exactly is the "play" aspect of "cosplay"? OK, you get dressed up, then what? Do you just wander around the convention hotel lobby getting photographed? And then maybe there's some competition or something like the Norwescon Masquerade? Or do you re-enact complete episodes of Incomprehensible Sakura Gundam Sailor Battle Bishonen Boy or whatever?

"Animal" excluding humans is not a clade or established taxon.

This has been a public-service announcement.

I'm playing around with the LJ clique-finder to see what it can reveal. I've noticed that even for people with hundreds of friends, it tends to pick out the "home group". In particular, I'm wondering if the cliques that it finds are easily characterisable. For instance, the largest cliques that it finds for me are all OLOTEAS people, so I would describe them as "OLOTEAS cliques".

Try this: enter your name. Click on the "recompute" link if necessary. Can you characterise the origin of or reason for a clique in a few words? Does your characterisation cover everyone in the clique? Is it the same for all cliques it finds for you, or are you in unrelated cliques? Unfortunately the finder shoes only the largest cliques, rather than all maximal ones.

Rare Exports, Inc., as requested by damiana_swan. About 66M. Happy Christmas!

You have an emitter and two detectors. There is no connection between these three components except that the emitter simultaneously emits a particle at each detector.

Each detector has three settings, 1, 2 & 3, and two lamps, red and green. When a detector receives a particle, one or other of the lamps flashes. So to run the experiment, you pick a setting on each detector, fire off the emitter, and see which lamp flashes on which detector.

You run this experiment thousands of times, with all possible settings on the detectors. You notice that when the two settings are the same (1 and 1, 2 and 2, or 3 and 3), the lamps always flash the same colour (red or green). But when the two settings are different, sometimes they flash the same, and sometimes they flash differently, but no matter how they are set differently (2 and 3, or 3 and 1, or whatever), the same proportion p are the same colour.

Is it possible for p to be zero (i.e. they always flash differently for different settings)? If not, what is the minimum possible p?

I don't think you get to choose your own identity directly, I think it's determined by other people. This includes gender and race (and whether or not one is a dragon for that matter). This is because identity is how you appear to other people, though perhaps mostly voluntary as how you present yourself. Accordingly, identity is different in different social contexts.

I keep having to remind myself that the U.S. is on the side of the good guys in this one...

CVS and case-insensitive file-systems don't mix. There is a case-sensitive option for the Mac OS X file system actually, but you have to reformat the disk to use it.

I'm collating ideas from science fiction and fantasy into a Book of Wonders, which I created last night. I have five so far. The site uses MediaWiki, so if you're a Wikipedia contributor and an SF fan, I encourage you to contribute.

I lost some email today, says my ISP. If you sent me something today, I might not have received it.

John Balance
Lost his balance
He fell on his head
Now he's dead.

Life's an adventure.

The aurora was pretty though, big flashing lights in the sky, and at one point it looked like the sky was faintly on fire.

On this day in 1605 was foiled an attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament during the State Opening, roughly equivalent to blowing up the Capitol during a State of the Union address. The plotters wanted to replace the Protestant King James I with his Catholic daughter Elizabeth. Guy Fawkes, a career soldier who has served with Catholic powers abroad, was the explosives expert, and the man found in a cellar underneath Parliament with slow matches, touchpaper and 2.5 metric tonnes of gunpowder in barrels. This became known as the Gunpowder Plot. Ronald Hutton, a historian specialising in the period, provides a lot of background in an interview with a television company, particularly why Protestantism vs. Catholicism was so fundamental to English politics at the time.

The anniversary is known as "Bonfire Night" and is celebrated throughout England with bonfires and fireworks as the closest thing England has to a recognised national day. The biggest celebrations are in Sussex, and the town of Lewes, where seventeen Protestants were burned at the stake by Mary I fifty years earlier, has the biggest celebrations in Sussex. The "Bonfire Boys" organised into several separate societies in the mid 19th century in response to repression from the authorities. The oldest of the present societies, the Cliffe, dates from 1853 and still retains an anti-Catholic attitude, something mostly forgotten elsewhere in the UK outside Northern Ireland. Each year they make a big flammable tableau and burn someone or thing in effigy, usually a topical political figure such as bin Laden (2001) or George Bush (2002). (BTW, in case you were wondering, "gob" is British slang for "mouth".) The rest of the Lewes societies participate in a big parade before going off to their fire-sites in different parts of the town to do their thing.

Lewes celebrations, like most around the country, are on the day, while several others in Sussex such as Hastings and Battle are in the weekends before and after to allow towns to visit each others. Here in Seattle I think a number of ex-pats do something in Golden Gardens Park, though I might be working too late to go myself.

"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

— Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace

Did you know the CIA World Factbook lists coastline length for all countries? For instance, we are told the UK has 12429km. Confused, I checked the definition, which unhelpfully said "this entry gives the total length [sic] of the boundary between the land area (including islands) and the sea".

One would hope they have an implied scale in mind. Anyone hazard a guess at what it is? Or do you think it's just whatever a thumb-width was on the maps available to some researcher?

I put up pictures of my visit to England in September.

Haskell has finally been added to the Sourceforge Trove, more than three years after I requested it.

Almost all of Broadway Market is now a huge QFC, moved one block south. It sells housewares in the basement, like the Fred Meyer that used to be there.

MSR Cambridge today released version 1.0 of F#, which is a version of OCaml for .NET. I haven't tried it yet, and may not, as it's an MS Windows thing. But it's nice to know it's there.

All that we see or seem is but a dream, a dream within a dream...

I don't see this movie as a "mystery" in the sense that one wonders which of several possible explanations is the right one. It's pretty clear to me the rock is a gateway to the otherworld, like the gateways to fairyland in the old stories. It attracts those who have a great deal of romantic feeling, perhaps from sexual energy that has no other form of expression. I'm fascinated particularly by the science teacher, Miss McCraw, who, knowing perfectly well what she's talking about, refers to "lava, forced up from deep down below" and extrusions "in a highly viscous state".

There's a point halfway up the rock where Marion and Miranda express detachment from the human world below them, as if they have already passed halfway away from it. Marion considers that most people have no purpose of their own, but perhaps they have one unknown to them. Miranda seems no longer troubled by the world: "everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place". Miss McCraw, for her part, on the drag muses on the foolishness of humanity. None of them return.

( pic )

Actually, the original manuscript of the book included a final chapter that explains what happens. It was left out at publication time, wisely I think.

I discovered today that the Larry's Market in Queen Anne has a "British Foods" section. I didn't buy any of their Ribena, Irn-Bru, Spotted Dick, treacle, Heinz baked beans, Farley's Rusks, brown sauce or digestives, but I did buy some chocolate-covered Hob-Nobs and some squashed-fly biscuits...

Too bad Apple hasn't come up with anything like this. Check out the video, with its "complete history of computers" montage at the beginning and 90's-era "this is the future" graphics and voice-over.

Of course, it's not actually available yet...

Update: The FlipStart is a similar idea, and is equally unavailable.

I lace my shoes using a variation of Criss Cross and tie them using the Secure Ian Knot.

"Get a fucking clue, get a fucking life, grow some fucking balls, and keep your fucking mouth shut. Alright?"

New Rule (Juan Cole): If you advocate the execution of novelists for writing novels, you and John Ashcroft deserve one another.

XML-based programming languages are teh sukc.

Bush isn't actually conservative, is he? When I think of "conservative", I think of cutting government spending (however you may feel about that). In particular, I would not call someone who cuts taxes but borrows more money to be conservative.

I would describe Bush as "militarist". I think that word ties together his foreign policy with such things as the USAPATRIOT Act much better than "conservative".

Happy Birthday faerievixen2!

Cleaning my apartment today, as I'll be leaving for England tomorrow for my sister's wedding. I'm not much looking forward to the jet lag.

I'll be back on Monday evening.

I went to a lecture by Ralf Lämmel on type-level computations in Haskell today. For those of you who know Haskell, it's this sort of thing:

data Zero;
data Succ a;

class Add a b ab | a b → ab, ab a → b;
instance Add Zero a a;
instance (Add a b ab) ⇒ Add (Succ a) b (Succ ab);

etc.

But he came up with a way of using this to check properties of functions at compile time, for example (that he gave) to check that the length of two concatenated lists is the sum of the length of the lists. It's fairly messy to do it in Haskell directly, so he has an extension to Haskell ("DHaskell") that can be converted to Haskell, which allows you to annotate your function definition to prove these kinds of properties to the compiler. Unfortunately I don't remember the exact syntax...

For a given level of intelligence, the more money you earn, the more economically conservative you are likely to be politically. For a given level of salary, the more intelligent you are, the more liberal you are likely to be. Note that I consider "liberal" to be a centrist position (say, Ralph Nader), with socialism on its left.

Accordingly, you can tell if someone is overpaid or underpaid by their political position.

May/Walsh winning match point.

All. Over. Each other.

Is it hot in here?

OK, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension makes no sense at all. You don't need an oscillation overthruster to drive an Econoline van through its plot holes. It is also very, very silly.

Received today, an amended birth certificate for my son, Oliver Richard Yakeley Caine, listing me as his father. Gwen chose "Oliver", which means "olive tree" and reflects the Ancient Greek theme of the festival where he was conceived. I chose "Richard" for the number of friends I've had in my life named "Richard" (at least four, and it also happens to be my sister's husband's name). "Yakeley" and "Caine" of course are our family names.

Thank you 3countylaugh and brighids_own for helping me with the paperwork. Twice.