Assorted Links and Notes

Notes:

1.  We got a new dishwasher recently, after getting fed up with our old one. It sounded like a screaming animal in our kitchen. So we went and bought a Kenmore Elite that's billed as the quietest dishwasher on the market. So far it's great. I love it. It cleans much better and dries much better than our old one. And it is crazy quiet. Now our microwave is louder than our dishwasher.

2.  We also got a new Tivo. The old one was rebooting randomly, and replacing the hard drive didn't help. The new one is a big step up. It has several new features I love, like showing a list of all the movies that are on right now, and a list of all the sports that are on right now. And it has six (six!) tuners. Our old one only had two! On Saturdays I like to put each tuner on a different college football game, so I can jump back and forth between them all and still be able to rewind if needed. I actually feel cheated when the Tivo changes a tuner to record a program for us. "Hey, I was using that!", I say. "Now I've only got five games to switch between!"

3.  The only bummer with the new Tivo is that I could never get it to fully work with the new wireless router I bought a couple months ago. I tried the old router with the new Tivo, and everything worked fine. So after exhausting all the ideas I had, and all the ideas I could find on the internet, I went out and bought yet another new router. This time I went with a Netgear Nighthawk. And thankfully it worked with the new Tivo. So it's been a relatively expensive couple of months.

4.  It was almost a year ago that I sat down to watch something, anything, on TV, and there happened to be an animated show called Adventure Time that was just starting. The episode was called Simon and Marcy. It was weird and bittersweet and I loved it. Wendy was hooked, too. Over the next few months we watched every episode that aired, learning all about Finn the Human and Jake the Dog, and all the bizarre inhabitants of the Land of Ooo. It is easily the most imaginative show I've ever seen. And after a long hiatus, new episodes began airing this week! Tonight we watched a new episode called Jake the Brick, where Jake fulfills his lifelong dream of being a brick. It was bizarre and charming and lovely.

5.  This has been a cold fall from the very beginning. I never got a chance for any more bike rides, which was disappointing. So my season total ended at 129 miles.

Links:

Big 12 Sports Update

I've made a bunch of updates to my Big 12 Sports river the past couple of weeks. Originally I was relying on my RSS reader to fetch and display all the feeds. Now I've written my own software to do that, so I have more control over the final product. There were several things I didn't like about the RSS-reader's version:

  • It showed duplicate stories. If the Tulsa World had an article mentioning OU and OSU, it appeared twice, once under each school's feed.
  • The length of each story varied wildly. Some had a short summary while others displayed the entire text of the article.
  • The images were inconsistent. Some stories had images, some didn't. Sometimes the images were so large they ran into the story below them.

I was able to fix all of that by creating my own river. You can take a look at it here:

http://big12.randyl.org/

I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. Duplicates are gone; images are gone; and all the stories are roughly the same size. And in case you're curious, it updates every hour. I can't take credit for the design, however. A handful of others created a "Beautiful River" design that I incorporated, with a few tweaks.

A few months ago I picked up a programming book called "Taming Text", which is all about analyzing and manipulating text documents. It gave me several grand ideas of features to try out, which is part of what inspired me to create the river in the first place. I've put those ideas on hold for now, though. They would be a lot of work to implement, and it's already been a lot of work just to get to this point. 

As an example, I could apply classification algorithms to each story to determine what sport it covered. Then there could be tabs at the top of the river to switch between each sport. That would be useful when basketball season is in full swing, so you could easily see the football stories at a glance. Another grand idea is to automatically extract people's names from a story and display them as metadata under each link in the river. You could see who was mentioned in each story at a glance. I'm not sure how useful that would be, but it could be a fun learning exercise at the very least.

But those ideas are for a later day. In the meantime, I'll see how my current river works out.

Star Trek: TNG

A couple of summers ago, for some unknown reason, I found myself craving Star Trek: The Next Generation. I watched a lot of it growing up, and loved it, but I knew there were plenty of episodes I'd never seen. I started thinking it would be fun to watch the entire series, all 7 seasons, beginning to end.

My mind went to work. I knew you could buy the entire series on DVD. I began hatching elaborate plans to buy the DVDs, rip each episode onto my computer, transfer them all onto an external hard drive, and connect it to my Tivo, so I'd have every episode available with a few pushes of the button. I knew it would be laborious work, since I'd have to assign each video file with the right episode name and number, so I could tell what I was about to watch and what came next. But it would be worth it. Then I started figuring out what kind of external hard drive I'd need. How much space? What type is compatible with Tivo? How much would it cost? At some point I finally checked the price of the DVDs , and I was dismayed. It was way more expensive than I thought, and there were some negative reviews claiming a few of the discs didn't even work. My plans were ruined.

Which was a good thing. Because somewhere amidst that mental chaos it dawned on me that Netflix has the entire series available for streaming online, and it would only cost me $8 per month. Good grief! is what I thought. That would be so much simpler! What on earth had I been thinking? So I signed up for Netflix streaming and with almost no effort on my part (a few pushes of the button) I began watching Season 1.

And then I realized how much time this was going to take. Almost every season had 26 episodes. Each episode was 45 minutes. I planned to watch them casually, here and there, rather than marathon style. Getting through one season would take a long time. I couldn't even begin to guess how long watching all 7 would take.

Regardless, I started watching. Regularly at first, watching several episodes a week. But then summer turned to fall and college football consumed most of my TV time. I got back into it during winter, but then went through months-long stretches where I didn't watch any episodes.

At some point in there we switched our streaming service from Netflix to Amazon Prime. I discovered that Amazon had all the Star Trek seasons too, and was about the same price as Netflix, but also came with free 2-day shipping. So that sealed the deal. We switched and have loved it ever since. I was able to pick up Star Trek right where I left off.

Earlier this year, though, the Star Trek watching hit a snag, because of buffering. Episodes would pause at random places while more data downloaded. It was extremely frustrating. There were a few times an episode was unwatchable because buffering happened every few seconds. Around this time, "net neutrality" was in the news, so I figured Comcast was to blame. It had been shown they were deliberately slowing down Netflix traffic, and it wasn't much of a stretch to assume they were doing the same with Amazon. So I basically stopped watching for most of this year.

But then last month, a thought occurred to me. My wi-fi router was close to a decade old. What if the problem wasn't Comcast, but a router that was showing its age? That was reason enough to try, so I went to Best Buy and bought a new dual-band router that was able to optimize for streaming video.

And it worked! Not only is buffering gone, but the start-up time for a streaming video is much faster. I'm happy to report I'm back on the Star Trek watching bandwagon, and I just hit the halfway point! I'm three and a half seasons into the series, and season 4 is the best so far. It took me two years to get to this point, but I'm hoping the last half will go faster. I'm looking forward to it.

And in the back of my mind I keep thinking: maybe I'll watch all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, too!

Assorted Links

  • I got an email today from Subaru letting me know that all national parks have free admission this Saturday. I clicked the Find a park link where I learned there's only one national park in the entire state of Illinois, and we've already been to it. It's Abraham Lincoln's home in Springfield. And on top of that, it's already free; there's never an admission fee.
  • Lincoln's Pets: "When asked if her husband had a hobby, Mary Todd Lincoln replied, 'cats.'"
  • A much longer article on Lincoln and animals.
  • Black and white cat photography

Kubrick and UFOs

Stanley Kubrick has long been my favorite director. His top films, the ones I would happily watch at any time, include 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove, Paths of Glory, The Shining, Barry Lyndon, and Eyes Wide Shut. They are all fantastic.

Of those movies, though, 2001 stands out as the best. It won an Academy Award for visual effects, is often listed as one of the best movies ever made, is definitely one of the best science fiction films ever made, features an artificially intelligent computer going on a murderous rampage, traces the influence of extraterrestrial beings on human evolution, and has an ending that can't be explained, only experienced. As Kubrick stated, he "tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content."

So, it's a good movie.

Many years ago I came across a well-worn copy of The Making of Kubrick's 2001 at a used bookstore. It's an excellent book edited by Jerome Agel. There's really no narrative; it's just an eclectic collection of quotes, interviews, articles, reviews, fan mail, reactions, 96 pages of photographs, behind-the-scenes notes, basically a hodgepodge of anything and everything related to the movie. It was published in 1970, two years after the movie's release. For a fan of the movie, the book is heaven.

The best part of the book is at the end: a full reprint of Kubrick's interview with Playboy magazine in 1968. The topics are wide-ranging. After trying to get Kubrick to explain what 2001 means, which he refuses to do, saying "2001 is a nonverbal experience", the interviewer asks if the movie is a religious film. The answer is emphatically yes ("the God concept is at the heart of 2001") but in a very nontraditional manner. To explain his point, Kubrick brings up the topic of extraterrestrial life, and proceeds to blow our minds with a discussion of how extraterrestrials may have evolved, given enough time:

They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities — and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.

...

They would be incomprehensible to us except as gods; and if the tendrils of their consciousness ever brushed men's minds, it is only the hand of God we could grasp as an explanation.

...

The important point is that all the standard attributes assigned to God in our history could equally well be the characteristics of biological entities who billions of years ago were at a stage of development similar to man's own and evolved into something as remote from man as man is remote from the primordial ooze from which he first emerged.

The interview continues on, focusing for several pages on various aspects of extraterrestrial life, such as the cultural impact of first contact. Eventually, the topic turns to UFOs. "What's your opinion?" asks the interviewer.

This launches Kubrick into a discussion of recent reports on the UFO phenomenon, such as by L. M. Chassin, a French Air Force general, and Dr. J. Allen Hynek, an astronomy professor at Northwestern University. He then covers some of the more conventional explanations for UFOs (ball lightning, etc) and briefly points out how they don't explain all the evidence. Then he adds:
As you've probably deduced, I'm really fascinated by UFOs and I only regret that this field of investigation has to a considerable extent been pre-empted by a crackpot fringe... That kind of kook approach makes it very easy to dismiss the whole phenomenon which we do at our own risk.
I was thrilled when I read this. I had always held the opinion that if you can set aside any preconceptions you have on the topic and seriously examine the evidence, then the conclusion was obvious. UFOs are physical objects that seem to represent a non-human intelligence. To learn that my favorite director thought the same way and shared the same fascination with the topic as I did was extremely exciting!

And speaking of examining the evidence, Kubrick offered this sobering statement: "Actually, if you examine even a fraction of the extant testimony you will find that people have been sent to the gas chamber on far less substantial evidence."

Before leaving the topic of extraterrestrials and UFOs, the interviewer asked one last question about critics who point to the speed of light as a reason UFOs can't be interstellar, saying it would simply take too long to travel between the stars. I've always loved Kubrick's reply:
I find it difficult to believe that we have penetrated to the ultimate depths of knowledge about the physical laws of the universe. It seems rather presumptuous to believe that in the space of a few hundred years, we've figured out most of what there is to know. So I don't think it's right to declaim with unshakable certitude that light is the absolute speed limit of the universe. I'm suspicious of dogmatic scientific rules; they tend to have a rather short life span.
The interview then moved on to other topics, but none were as interesting.

So that was my favorite used-book purchase ever. I bring all of this up for several reasons:
  1. To hopefully demonstrate there's enough evidence to take the UFO subject seriously.
  2. To show that Kubrick was awesome.
  3. To lay the groundwork for a future post, where I'll discuss a book I read this summer. It's the most fascinating book I've read in a long, long time.

Big 12 Sports

I'm trying something new this year to stay on top of all the Big 12 football news. The past several days I've been tracking down the major newspapers covering the Big 12 and subscribing to their conference-related RSS feeds. The idea is that I'll collect them all into one mega-RSS feed, so I'll have a constantly updating stream of Big 12 news. This is called a "river of news" in RSS-speak.

Here are the papers and sports sections I've found so far:

If you know of any papers I'm missing, please let me know. After I collected all their RSS feeds (which was a painstaking process), I subscribed to all of them in my RSS reader, put them all in one folder, and then made that folder public.  Here's the result:

http://www.inoreader.com/stream/user/1005856014/tag/Big+12+Sports/view/html

It's a river of Big 12 sports news from all of the above papers. It probably has more content than one person can reasonably keep up with, but that's okay. The idea is you can dip your toes in the river at any time and get a sense for what's going on. Ideally I would like it to focus only on football, but most newspapers don't have sport-specific feeds, just college-specific ones. So I'll have to settle for a mostly football river.

That URL is too complex to remember, though, so I set up another URL here:

http://big12.randyl.org

It will redirect you to the first URL, and is much easier to remember.

I mentioned curating this list was a painful process. There are several reasons:

  • It's not obvious where a newspaper's RSS feeds can be found, or if they even have any. Some newspapers have an RSS page that lists every feed. For others, you have to go to the Sports section, for example, and look for an RSS link.
  • Sometimes the RSS links don't work. Tulsa World was the worst offender. They have an entire page of RSS feeds, but They. Don't. Work. Ugh. As far as I can tell, the only way to get an RSS feed is to search their website for keywords (like "OU Sports") and then choose RSS as the display option.
  • Sometimes the RSS feeds are out of date, like the Houston Chronicle. They have a list of feeds for various college teams, but they return results from last year.

To end on a more enjoyable note, here are several things I've learned from my river so far:

The Charleston Daily Mail is doing a segment each week on the traditions of West Virginia's opponent. 

  • Their first opponent was Alabama and is detailed here. It discusses, among other things, how a muddy field led to Alabama becoming known as the Crimson Tide, and how the varsity team being forced to sit the first quarter of a game led to the elephant becoming their mascot. 
  • Their second opponent was Towson, detailed here. Their mascot has been, over the years, the Teachers, the Principals, the Schoolmasters, the Indians, the Golden Knights, and finally, the Tigers (along with 27 other NCAA teams).
  • Maryland is their opponent this week, but that article hasn't posted yet. Edit: Link is here.

And finally, Bob Stoops' favorite gift ever was a shower head.

Gas Cans

I had no idea gas can technology had advanced so irritatingly in the last 7-8 years. I have a one-gallon plastic gas can I've been using for years. The spout recently cracked, causing it to leak whenever I poured gas into the lawn mower. So I went to the store to buy a new one, but they all had this weird spout that I didn't quite understand at first glance. That was the only option, though, so I bought it.

When I took it home and tried to use it, I couldn't believe how complicated it was. I'm used to two steps: 1) take the cap off the spout and 2) pour. The instructions for the new gas can had four steps (!), not including taking the cap off the spout. It was ridiculous. So I kept using the leaky gas can for a few weeks. At some point I figured I'd go to various stores until I found a gas can with a normal spout.

Then Wendy, by coincidence, stumbled upon a blog post where someone was ranting about the terrible new spouts on gas cans. Apparently they are all like that, and it's California's fault. In an effort to reduce smog, they mandated the use of new gas cans that wouldn't leak fumes and would prevent spillage. The EPA liked the idea, so they mandated the new cans for everyone.

The problem, as many people have pointed out, is that the new spouts are so complicated you need at least three hands to operate them, and you wind up spilling more gas than you ever did with the old spouts.

I am so glad Wendy found that article. I was relieved that I was not the problem, and that everyone else found the new cans terribly irritating. Fortunately, there is a solution: you can buy an EZ-POUR spout online, which is the old-style spout. I bought one immediately.

But here's the most ridiculous part of the whole thing: 

Buying the old-style gas can spouts is illegal in a number of states. But, proving that America is the truly the cradle of innovation, retailers have taken the same spouts, put them in a different package, and labeled them "water can spout", thus making them perfectly legal to sell.

My new spout came in the mail recently. I put it on my old gas can and now everything is good. No more leaks.

It is mind-boggling that something so simple can be made so complex.

Bike Ride

20.87 miles from McHenry to Wisconsin

Riding time: 2 hours 2 minutes

Season total: 129 miles

Notable wildlife spotted: squirrels, snakes, roosters, chipmunks, birds, butterflies, grasshoppers, and mosquitoes.

Summer

On our way to the grocery store this morning, we came up with a list of signs that summer is about to end:

  1. Acorns have begun falling.
  2. Geese have returned to the pond.
  3. School buses have returned to the roads.
  4. Halloween stores have opened up.
  5. Preseason football has started.

And that leads to a related topic: it took 8-9 years, but I finally feel like I've become acclimated to northern Illinois. For example:

  1. I started watching hockey the past couple of seasons.
  2. I used to think that summers here were never hot enough; now when temps reach the upper 80s I think it's too hot.
  3. August feels like the start of fall, not the peak of summer.

One of the best parts of watching a Chicago Blackhawks hockey game (sometimes it is the best part) is the singing of the national anthem by Jim Cornelison. The guy is an opera singer, and when he sings, everything in our house stops to listen. It seriously rocks. And it never gets old. If you haven't heard him sing before, check it out here. Every Blackhawks home game starts like that.

Edges of Science

A few weeks ago I took Wendy's car in for scheduled maintenance. To pass the time, I brought my tablet along so I could read a back issue of the JSE. One of the articles was about a class taught at the University of Colorado in 2010 called Edges of Science.

As part of the class, students took part in an experiment to test practical uses of remote viewing, which is a form of ESP. Basically, every week researchers said to the students: "In two days, you will be shown a picture. Please draw that picture now." The students would do their best to draw the picture, having no idea what it might be.

The researchers had an independent person pick two pictures from a pool of photographs, and randomly assign one to mean "the stock market went up" and the other to mean "the stock market went down". Then a team of judges looked at each of the students' drawings and rated which of the two pictures it most closely resembled. The ratings were tallied up to see which picture (market-going-up or market-going-down) got the most votes. The next day researchers would buy and sell options depending on which picture was selected.

Finally, and this was the most crucial step, two days after students drew their pictures, they were shown the picture corresponding to what the market actually did. They called this the feedback loop. Since the students were trying to predict a future event (being shown a picture), it was critical that the event actually happen, and that the picture matched the actual performance of the stock market.

They did this for 7 weeks, and every week the students correctly predicted how the market would perform. The researchers started off with $10,000 and ended with $26,000. They also pointed out that one week there was a timing delay with their market order, which cost them $12,000. Without that delay, they would have nearly quadrupled their money, from $10K to $38K.

The experiment was limited to 7 weeks because it occurred during the latter part of the semester. Researchers wondered whether such a high success rate could be maintained in the long run. Apparently a number of psychic studies have had good success in the short term, but in the long term have declined in performance until reaching what would be expected from random chance.

I'm curious what they did with the money; the article didn't mention it. I also wonder what other topics the class covered. It sounds like a lot of fun.