Posts

Jan 18, 2025 — The full title of this book is The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922-1945. I discovered it when following up on a post by John Ganz. Ganz mentioned a book called Behemoth, which was about the Nazi government and how it was a chaotic collection of feuding power centers. But this related book is the one that interested me: what was it like to become Nazi Germany, and why did ordinary people flock to the movement, despite what we know today? I got what I was looking for. My question was well answered, and I recognize all or most of the forces that were at work. I’d like to share some quotes from the book, by theme, so as to summarize the insights.

Sep 7, 2024 — The following is a list of ideas I gathered for adding flavor and tactics to D&D board games in the Adventure Game system. Personally we own Tomb of Annihilation. Environment outdoors in Chult there might be a tropical storm PCs get Exhaustion 1, and do a DC 10 Constitution check or gain Exhaustion 2 Exhaustion 1: ability checks have disadvantage Exhaustion 2: speed halved With black triangles, roll D2 and either draw an Encounter card or draw a monster Saving throws for any traps (or trap encounters, like hidden tripwire, hail of traps)

Mar 31, 2024 — Wagner and Tolkien: Mythmakers is a book by Renée Vink.

Aug 28, 2023 — I’ve owned the book The Future Does Not Compute by Stephen Talbott for almost 30 years, but for a million reasons it was only recently that I focused on reading it. What I found was what I always knew I’d find: thoughtful and clear reflections on some problems with computing. I want to relate some of his main arguments, and give you an idea of what an eloquent writer he is.

Nov 5, 2018 — This post accompanies a pair of talks given at CMU in November 2018. Coming soon: my notes from the talk, and possibly a screencast. Links Wikipedia article about differential structures, with a table of counts of exotic spheres. The Wild World of Four-manifolds by Alexandru Scorpan (2005), a simply wonderful resource about smooth structures in all dimensions, as a matter of fact. A post that helped me with a proof about the ring of smooth functions determining a manifold. A book that looks wonderful (Natural Operations in Differential Geometry by Kolar, Michor and Slovak, 1993), but which I’ve had to pilfer rudely for information about the fully faithful embedding of smooth manifolds inside the category of commutative algebras.

Jun 23, 2015 — I decided recently to embrace my dilettantism. I don’t think there have been two consecutive days in my life where I wanted to pursue and learn the same ideas. Now mind you, the complete list of topics is finite and I cycle back eventually.

Mar 24, 2012 — I have seen what 1080p from a Blu-ray looks like on iPad 3, and it is something to behold. The detail and the colors are just beautiful. Over the last few days I’ve worked through the technical issues of ripping one of my Blu-ray discs and converting it losslessly to a format the iPad can play. This doesn’t work for every Blu-ray because they are not all encoded on the disc in H.264. For example, Blade Runner: The Final Cut is encoded in VC1, and so I had to transcode that (but it still looks amazing). But the LOTR Extended trilogy uses H.264 and so you can have perfection. The steps were:

Jun 15, 2011 — As I have written previously, I created an annotated list of excerpts from The Lord of the Rings to encapsulate the differences in the plot (and theme) from the Peter Jackson films. I was unhappy with the tabular format of a Google spreadsheet though, and so I cast around for other ways to present this information. My requirements were

Jun 14, 2011 — This is a post to test the functionality of MathJax. Just put a simple script tag in your header, pointing to a global copy of mathjax.js distributed via Amazon’s CloudFront content distribution network. After that, you can enter LaTeX or MathML directly in your posts and MathJax will render it into beautiful equations. Here is a favorite (from my dissertation):

Sep 30, 2010 — If I’m fixing a typo where I typed “loose” instead of “lose”, then is it less wasteful if I click inside and delete one of the “o"s, versus double-clicking the whole word and typing four brand new letters? If I do it the first way, it seems like I am reusing the existing four correct letters, so it seems less wasteful.

Sep 26, 2010 — I learned something new this weekend. First, I learned that one of my favorite childhood games, Archon, has some spiritual successors. The game designer Paul Reiche III, who designed Archon, went on to design other games from his studio Toys for Bob. I just learned all of this when I was listening to a podcast where some old timers like me were discussing the game Star Control 2, which Reiche designed and which was released for PC in 1992, and then on 3DO. It sounded like a great game, and given the Archon pedigree I was curious to try it out. Well the good news is that 3DO released the source code back to Reiche in 2002 and he made it open source, and so there are many ways to play the game today on modern hardware including Mac, PC, Wii, and Android. The name “Star Control 2” is trademarked and so this open source version is called “The Ur-Quan Masters.” Having played for 30 minutes, I was immediately drawn in to the accessible gameplay, the gentle introduction that gives you full control but subtly guides you to try new things, and the tinge of humor in the dialog. An abandonware success story!

Sep 26, 2010 — I finished editing Star Wars, and my 3-year-old loves it, and I feel guilt-free about showing it to her. There were some wrinkles during the process, so the current version is actually the third one I made (I’m REAL familiar with the movie now, at least around the problematic scenes). I ended up having success with the Mac-based tool SimpleMovieX, and in fact it’s the first piece of software I’ve paid for in a long time (and it’s not cheap, $40). The free version is full-featured, but saving out the whole movie would have taken a couple of days because they deliberately slow down file saves in order to get you to pay. Still, I ended up liking that particular method of having a free trial, because it let me experiment with all the features over any number of weeks or months (which is sometimes how long it takes me to get my act together).

Sep 11, 2010 — My daughter is 3, and her best friend is also 3. He has been shown the entire Star Wars trilogy already, and is in love with Darth Vader. So my daughter hears about it a lot, and is excited to see it too. Recently I showed her a couple moments from Episode 4, and she loved it. So I’m going to try to make a version of the movie that is appropriate for her. I’ll edit out everything I deem too intense or violent, and see how it goes. So far, I have a rip of the DVD, and I’m trying to get it into iMovie.

Jul 10, 2010 — I am so excited at the possibilities the iPad holds for gaming, especially strategy gaming. Others have voiced enthusiasm, but I think there’s another level or two of excitement that folks are missing. So let’s hasten the story along because I want to play these games. Let me convince you I’m right, and then you can go make some games for me. I’ll pay $50 for the games I have in mind. Do you hear me, Matrix, Paradox, Slitherine, Panther, Creative Assembly, SSG, Firaxis, Big Huge Games, TGW, Wizards, and friends?

Jul 10, 2010 — I finished my project to annotate the differences between the book and movie version of LOTR. So I updated my earlier post to point to the finished product.

Mar 30, 2010 — I’ve read a few theories about the origin of our expression “OK.” But I haven’t come across this one that occurred to me the other day. When you hold your hand in that gesture that means “OK”, you make a circle with your thumb and index finger. That’s an O, and your other three fingers sort of make a “K”. The middle finger is the vertical stem, and the other two fingers are the diagonal ones. Just a thought.

Mar 24, 2010 — I’m definitely a “lifelong learner” type, always craving new courses, books, or ideas. I even love reading long computer game manuals for complicated games like Europa Universalis 3. It’s pretty easy to learn the beginning of a new field, because there are usually some audiobooks, Teaching Company courses, or online materials to introduce you to the main concepts. But what if you already know a lot about something, and you want to learn even more?

Dec 8, 2009 — Here’s a list of a few things I like: books, audiobooks, music, movies, video games, iPhone apps. I consume these items on a variety of devices: Kindle, iPhone, PC, Mac, Xbox, PS3, Wii. Most of those platforms have a digital download mechanism in place for the software, e.g. you can download music or audiobooks from the iTunes store, Amazon or Audible. You can download movies from iTunes, Amazon, Xbox, or PS3. You download iPhone apps from iTunes. You can download Kindle books from Amazon. You can download many PC games from Steam. Some games are ONLY available for download. The consoles have their own built-in stores that use points or a credit card.

Nov 30, 2009 — I use my iPhone quite heavily as an ebook reader. I read in various situations, but one of the most frequent is when I’m in bed. When you’re lying down, either on your back or on your side, it can be quite a strain on your hand muscles to grip the phone and also use your thumb to scroll the pages. So a while back, I came up with a super-cheap way to improve the situation by adding a strap that holds the phone to your hand (actually, it holds it to just your index finger). Whenever I show this trick to other folks, including seasoned, cynical tech folks, they seem impressed. So I thought I would post it for search engines to find. All you need are

Jul 27, 2009 — On my Mac, I had a movie in my Movies folder called “Sesame Street Season 1 part 1.m4v”. I dragged it to iTunes so I could play it there (for my daughter), and all was well. One day I wanted to move those old Sesame Streets into a folder called “old”, so I made the “old” folder and dragged that movie in, no big deal.

Jul 19, 2009 — I am a huge fan of Peter Jackson’s movie versions of The Lord of the Rings novels. A HUGE fan. But I am also a fan of the books, which I have read several times, and which I have also done supplementary reading on.

May 18, 2009 — I’m going way out on a limb here, so bear with me. 42% of Americans are pro-choice, according to a new Gallup poll, and 51% are pro-life. My response to this is: since so many Americans disagree with the pro-life stance, then we should stick with the neutral road, which is the policy to keep abortions legal.

Mar 13, 2009 — I was linked to this video today and really enjoyed it. I have never heard of Alom Shaha, but I hope to see more from him in the future. Why is Science Important? from Alom Shaha on Vimeo.

Feb 24, 2009 — I’m reading an interesting book about economics, public policy, and psychology. It’s called Nudge. They make many interesting points that were completely new to me about the way people do not behave in the rational manner modeled by the previous generation of economists. In fact, there are systematic biases in our decision-making that can be quantified and worked around by enacting sensible policies. The cover issues ranging from the Medicare prescription drug plan to 401k plans, to organ donation, to the environment. The ideas are presented clearly with lots of examples. Highly recommended.

Jan 12, 2009 — I’m so tired of living with Windows Vista. Especially when it comes to USB. Whenever I plug in a USB device that I’ve used a million times before, but I plug it into a different USB port, Vista goes into overdrive. “Searching for driver!” it exclaims in a balloon. The hard drive churns and churns for about two minutes. You can’t do anything else disk-intensive during this time, so basically you’re just waiting at this point. If you click the little tray icon that appears, it says “Searching for driver in installed locations” or something. Finally it’s done and it says “Canon digital camera.” No kidding, the one I plugged in yesterday? Congratulations. Maybe I should plug it into each port in my hub so that I can go through this once and then know that I’m safe.