Sorry, the pi related content is a bit thin this year; instead of researching the state of pi, I spent most of the weekend banging on MySQL and Perl for a project I’m working on. (I expect that folks will see some of the results of that project in an upcoming “Talking GPS Blues” post.)
In the meantime, there will be pie.
Watch this space for updates.
Latest news from Vegas: the Sahara is closing in May.
This is sad news for me personally. I’ll admit the Sahara was kind of run down, but it was one of the cheapest rooms available on the Strip. I preferred it slightly to the Imperial Palace (which seems to me to be even more run down these days); on my last few trips to DEFCON, I’ve stayed at the Sahara. (Being slightly run down doesn’t bother me too much when I’m on the road. All I’m really looking for is a bed, toilet, roof, and a place for my stuff. I don’t spend a lot of time in my room.)
(I wasn’t planning on staying there this time; since the convention is at the Rio this year, I’m more likely to stay there.)
Coverage from the Las Vegas Sun. The Sun’s coverage makes another good point; one of the stations for the Vegas Monorail (which is also in deep trouble) is the Sahara. I’ll be interested in seeing how that plays out.
(Also: are they going to try to keep the NASCAR Cafe open? I never ate there; the advertising always seemed to be more about quantity than quality, which really turned me off.)
I believe it was one of the early 80s cyberpunk writers (I’m thinking Bruce Sterling, but it could have been Lew Shiner) who suggested that the most generic possible SF book title combined the words “star”, “song”, “dream”, and ‘”dancers”. For example, “Dream Song of the Star Dancers”. Or “Star Dancers of the Dream Song”.
I was strongly reminded of this by a post at the Tor website, outlining the most common words in fantasy and SF titles. Song and dance is apparently out; dragons and war are apparently in. A reflection of the time we live in?
(Hattip: the Scalzinator on the Twitter. His list of demands for Tor if they want him to write <go to the Tor link> actually sounds pretty reasonable to me. I mean, who among us has not wanted all of those things? Well, with one exception in my case, simply because I live in an apartment. But other than that, perfectly reasonable.)
This is shaping up to be a major scandal, and I’m frankly shocked that I haven’t heard about it until now.
Local coverage from the SFChron. Curiously to me, the SFChron is not giving this story major play; I had to click several levels deep in their website to find it. On the other hand, this next story was front page news in the SFChron, even though it happened clear across the country:
This wouldn’t ordinarily be big news. But one of the people arrested was Felicia Pearson, who played “Snoop” on The Wire.
Damn shame.
This has turned out to be one chaotic morning, but I wanted to quickly note the latest news on the “Spider-Man” front:
My “Applications in Business Programming” class had our first meeting last night.
This
Note that it is:
Given that I paid $180 for the textbook for my previous class with this professor, I think this is worthy of praise. Well done, sir!
I haven’t done any explosives blogging in a while, and a conversation over the weekend reminded me that I had two links pending:
Derek Lowe’s latest “Things I Won’t Work With”: chlorine azide.
A while back, Joe Huffman (of Boomershoot fame) exchanged emails with a gentleman named Lawrence Johnston. Dr. Johnston worked at Los Alamos during the war: specifically, he worked on designing the detonation mechanism for the implosion bombs. Mr. Huffman has a link to a presentation Dr. Johnston gave in 2006, on his experiences at Los Alamos.
In particular, the material about designing the detonators is fascinating stuff. The problem with the implosion device is that, in order to get it to work, they had to set off 32 separate explosions (in explosive lenses arranged around the core of the bomb) and all of those explosions had to take place within 1/10th of a microsecond. Using conventional detonation mechanisms gives you a timing of several tens of microseconds, which won’t work when you’re trying to get a bunch of explosive fronts to converge into one spherical wave. So how do you solve this problem? Dr. Johnston developed the exploding bridgewire detonator for this purpose, and there’s some great stuff in his presentation about things like the D’autriche test for detonator timing, determining the blast yield of the early bombs, and what daily life at Los Alamos at the time was like. I commend Dr. Johnston’s presentation to your attention, and regret not blogging it sooner.
I thought about including this in the previous round of random notes, but on second thought it deserves a post by itself. Here are two epic tales from bloggers that I admire (though I have not met either of them):
Ambulance Driver and his buddy, Too Old to Work, Too Young to Retire, bring a woman back from the dead while on vacation.
Ken over at Popehat talks about a day in the glamorous life of a defense lawyer.
Some things worth noting in the NYT on this fine day:
Michael Ruhlman reviews Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider
Never mind.
You may ask yourself, “Why would someone pay $20,000 for a replica of an Eric Clapton Stratocaster, ‘complete with every single nick and scratch, including the wear pattern from Mr. Clapton’s belt buckle and the burn mark from his cigarettes’?” You would probably answer that question, “Because they’re a moron.” The NYT would like for you to know that evolutionary psychology suggests you’re wrong:
Yesterday was election day in Bell, California. How did things go?
Noted: Austin now has a Peruvian restaurant. (Okay, technically, Pflugerville.) Yes, I’m thinking Saturday Dining Conspiracy. No, not right away; we generally give places three months after opening before reviewing them.
Missed this one until I saw a link on FARK, but FARK’s link was to the USAToday story.
Pat Knight fired as Texas Tech basketball coach.
This does not seem to have been unexpected, with a 13-18 record (5-11 in conference).
(And, once again, someone told a local newspaper that auto-play videos are A-OK.)
Slow. Slow. Slow. And WordPress ate the first draft of this post. Argh. “Introduction to Literary Studies” is finished, but “Applications in Business Programming” fires up tonight.
So where were we?
Ken Hoffman in the HouChron on more rodeo food. The chocolate covered pickle makes us gag.
The NYT reports that Julie Taymor and the “Spider-Man” producers are “negotiating”. “Negotiating” in this case apparently means either “work with a newly expanded creative team” or “pack your <stuff> and get out”.
Speaking of art, damn it, art!, Lawrence has brought us happy news for those of you who own iPhones and are fans of Guy Debord, Karen Eliot, Monty Cantsin, and the Karen-headed Smile Monty (see also): there’s an app for that.
By way of Tam, we have learned that the Department of Homeland Security, which is apparently not satisfied with not actually catching terrorists, is going around confiscating Nissan Skylines. The Skyline is a car we were previously unfamiliar with, perhaps because it was never officially imported into the United States. One of Tam’s commenters provided this link to an excellent article about the rise and fall of a Skyline importer in California, which we commend to your attention.
Speaking of commenters, “Bob” (thanks, “Bob”) posted in this thread and provided a link with some new information about our good friend, the spamming scumbag Sven Alstrom. That link, in turn, led us to this one, which also has some good stuff about Sven. We were particularly amused by these two comments from LJWorld staff members:
and:
Sven makes friends everywhere he goes, doesn’t he?
The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is getting underway again this year.
But there’s been a change: the rodeo is no longer a Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association sanctioned rodeo. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a professional rodeo, or that there’s not money on the table ($1.75 million, according to the HouChron), just that winnings in the Houston rodeo aren’t officially counted by the PRCA, and don’t impact PRCA standings.
If I understand the story correctly, this doesn’t make Houston unique; some of the larger Canadian rodeos aren’t PRCA sanctioned, either, and it sounds like Houston may be trying to start up a competing rodeo circuit:
The goal is to become the top international invitational championship in the world.
It isn’t that I’m a huge rodeo fan (I’m not), but the situation is interesting. Lawrence made a good analogy to the whole CART/Indycar situation, which (as I see it) seriously damaged open wheel racing in the United States.