hermiene.net

Since last time, quite a few things have happened. I've moved and now live with four other people, I've started at university studying the English language and Her literature, I've quit my job at the convenience store (KIWI) and gotten a part-time job at a book store (Notabene), and I've broken the pinky on my left hand (I've operated and had my hand in a cast for a few weeks, but the cast is off now). Between the mishap of a broken proximal phalanx and the tumult of moving I've actually worked quite a bit on my web site. In particular I now link to uniformly-formatted versions of the Essays I've collected with a link to its source. I formatted everything almost entirely by hand, which took a while, except that I relied heavily on the spell checker and regular expression capabilities of TextPad. Also, I've added two new essays: An eclipse? It's my kind of magic (Dawkins) and Metacrap (Cory Doctorow) and two short stories, Carcinoma Angels (Norman Spinrad) and Shall the Dust Praise Thee? (Damon Knight).

I've read Dangerous Visions, The God Particle, and Words of Science. I'm planning on reading many more books, and in preparation for that I scanned the covers of all the rest of my books which I haven't yet read, so that I don't have to do that when I've read them.

I linked to two small Flash games, This is the Only Level and Achievement Unlocked, which mercilessly mocks the pointlessness and strange addictiveness of Achievements (for the 360) and Trophies (for the PS3) in lieu of the real game (I have fallen prey to this myself, but am slowly breaking my addiction). I also linked to Doomsday, an emulator for Doom (among other games).

I added publisher information to my books, and started scanning my covers (front, back, spine, and in a few hardcover cases, the flaps of the dust jacket). I should be done with the scans pretty soon as I'm not Photoshopping them much. I don't remove creases, sticker smudge, and the like. I might do that in the future, though, when I have more free time on my hands than I currently have.

I added a series system to my Books page and assigned every applicable book to a series. I'm not entirely sure I've done every book correctly; there are many disagreements and there are many hard-core fans, so there are many ways to do it. I've toyed with the idea of also assigning every book with a series to a universe, where series is a subset of (and completely enclosed by) universe. For instance, Ringworld is now in the Known Space series, but arguably that's the Known Space universe, where the series is the eponymous Ringworld series. And to further complicate things, authors sometimes merge series, as in Asimov's Robot series which merges into the Empire series which merges into the Foundation series. Some people even sub-divide the Foundation series into Pre-Foundation, Foundation, and End-Foundation. And then there's the problem of parallel series, as in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game novels, which run parallel to his Ender's Shadow novels. And all of those combined might be said to reside in the Enderverse. Oy vey!

I went through every post and updated the links to suit my new Books page scheme. Now, every link to a book is a permalink. Also, I've thought of some new features for the page which I'll incorporate in the next few days.

My new and spiffy Books page is up. Shiny! It now works approximately like I want it to. In particular, I haven't yet figured out how to make it display books that are in the intersection of a set of categories; instead, it currently spews forth books that are a result of the union of that set. So, if I'd want to display only SF anthologies, my Books page would list all books in the category "Science fiction" and all books in the category "Anthology". I get all my SF anthologies, plus a bunch of books I'm not interested in. It does this for some reason, and I have a strong hunch that the same reason is behind another annoying "feature" (bug) of my Books page. Namely, books that are in several categories will only show the category (or categories) currently selected. I suspect that I'll solve both of these deficiencies in one fell swoop.

So, with a working books page, here are the books I've read recently: Climbing Mount Improbable, The Ancestor's Tale, and The Old Man and the Sea. The URLs are now pretty nice, aren't they? I dread having to go through the entire archive and fit the previous posts' mentioning of books to this new scheme, something I'll force myself to do. Soon.

Nowadays I don't discover many new good web comics, but one recently trickled in: Drawing Board.

Pollen and heat are making my life pretty miserable. Fortunately, I have medicine for the former and a desktop fan for the latter, though they only partially mitigate the horrors. Bleah.

I made a table out of the navigation bar. I think it might work better than a list, though it's still far from the best way of doing things.

I'm going away for a week but when I get back I want to make a really awesome Books page, though I think I'll have to learn more about databases before I can really get started. (So far all my database tables have been "flat" and not "relational" — I think that's the correct terminology — which means that they could just as well have been in a flat .txt file or in the HTML source itself. With my rewrite of Books I plan to have two tables, one for the books and one for the authors, which means it will be easier to list by author or title. My previous incarnation of Books did this, it's true, but you should have seen the code...)

Hello, world!

James Blair, whom I met ages ago on IRC, has hosted my pages for about a year and a half now, and I should like to thank him for hosting them for me for free all this time. I should like to doubly thank him, because when moving web space and host I completely forgot to back up my database, and Blair kindly went and retrieved all my data for me (silly me). Now, they are hosted by one.com and the new canonical address is http://hermiene.net/, rendering the old one, http://havard.awegasm.net/, obsolete (although that address still forwards to the new one). Most of the stuff on my site is up and running properly, but a few things still remain to be fixed, most conspicuously the Archive and the Books pages (I will be working on this in the coming days).

I've read The End of Faith and View From a Height, and reviews of these will come as soon as I've rewritten the Books page.

I've transcribed another essay, The Modern Demonology (Asimov), and linked to another one, Elephants' Wings (PZ Myers). I've also transcribed two more short stories, Evensong (Lester del Rey) and The Malley System (Miriam Allen deFord).

My posts usually take the form of a changelog, but this time I'm doing something a tiny bit different. I've lived with Even for over half a year, and when we moved in one of the silly little things we wanted to do (and did once) was to update our respective blogs at the same time, and we're doing just that now. And so for this post, I'll simply tell you about a few of the things I know that I find pretty awesome (saving the real updates, of which there actually are a lot, for next time).

The Feynman point (after the famous American physicist Richard Feynman) is the 762nd decimal number of pi, which is a 9, and which is followed by five more 9s (this is the first time in the pi sequence that six consecutive digits occur). Feynman said he wanted to memorize digits of pi that far so that he could say, "Nine nine nine nine nine nine, and so on."

Salvador Dali's brother died nine months before Dali himself was born, and once when Dali was five, his father took him to the cemetery to his brother's grave. He told him that he (Salvador) was a reincarnation of his brother, and Dali came to believe it. "We resembled each other like two drops of water, but we had different reflections," Dali said. He "was probably a first version of myself but conceived too much in the absolute."

The Shepard scale (named after Roger Shepard, an American cognitive scientist) is a peculiar auditory illusion. A sound is played and it sounds as though the pitch descends (or ascends), but in reality it stays the same. The illusion works for both discrete and continuous notes (YouTube links).

Sun dogs, or parhelia (from Greek words meaning "mock suns"), are false suns in the sky, and they usually come in pairs (example).

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."

I transcribed two Asimov essays that I'd put off (they're in Robot Visions which I read a while back), The New Teachers and Whatever You Wish. I also took local copies of all the essays I've linked to on my Essays page, in case they ever disappear.

I have a slew of old SF movies to watch. Can you believe I haven't yet watched THX 1138 and only recently watched The Day the Earth Stood Still? I also discovered Buster Keaton, whose whole collection of movies I now have.

"Swimming in a raindrop, tasting all the colors. Walking on the wind, walking on the wind."

I'm going to try to avoid turning this post into Another Grocery List Update (AGLU) by first and foremost getting the AGLU out of the way.

I recently (and by "recently" I mean "two weeks ago") went on an Amazon shopping spree, buying lots of books. I've only read two of them, Richard Dawkins' River Out of Eden and Ian Steward's Letters to a Young Mathematician, and they are fantastic. I'm now simultaneously reading Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions (an SF short story anthology from which I collect and transcribe stories I like) and Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate (which, sadly, isn't a page-turner for me, but which is still a book I'd like to have read). I hope to finish them pretty soon (and by "pretty soon" I mean "in not more than one month").

You might notice the Google search bar. My site is becoming fairly large, and I've gotten requests to add one. You request, I oblige. Whenever I've needed something from my site which I didn't know where was (a rarity) I've simply googled site:havard.awegasm.net, but this search bar should make that method of doing things obsolete.

I also did some slight maintenance on the Nonogram and Games pages. I cleaned up the writing in Nonogram, correcting some slight mistakes and rewording things to make them more obvious, and I wrote a bit about the latest Prince of Persia game for the Games page. I also made a new page, Net, dedicated to the fascinatingly simple yet strangely addictive game net.

And for the last piece of AGLU, I slammed two new links into the Links page: TV Tropes (a wiki of media tropes) and MildlyHotPeppers (a web comic).

I'll give you a little treat. Did you know how Asimov met Ellison? Let Asimov explain. See? Those are the kinds of neat little stories I love so much and which get told so seldom.

For my next update, you might see (but I don't promise!) another page. Be patient.

My parents invited me to an art exhibition where all the pieces were made by psaligraphy, which is paper cutting. The pieces were encased in double sheets of transparent glass, which made the images I took rather poor because of glare. (Viewing them in person is no problem.) Every piece is exquisite, and making them is extremely time consuming (for the biggest piece in the exhibition the artist, Karen Bit Vejle, spent two months in preparation and half a year in execution).

After I'd updated yesterday, a friend of mine commented that it was "yet another grocery list update". This is too true! My "blog" (as I jokingly refer to it) is more a changelog than a creative output, and this is for semi-conscious reasons (the pages themselves should be the real stars of the show).

A while ago I met (by E-mail) and befriended a man from Canada named David Smart, who runs Itinerarium Mentis, and he invited me to become a contributor to Aristophrenium, a newly-founded blog of his. That's a blog, a proper blog, and I want to try my hand at it. Notice that unlike most blogs (which are chronological and about events) and unlike my "blog" (which is a changelog and about my hobbies), Aristophrenium will be about ideas (or at least, that's my hope). It will be my creative output for writing, something more permanent than IRC (which is the bit bucket into which most of my writing is thrown).

I return from the swamp of real life with lots of news.

Since my last post I've been through a horribly failed relationship and switched jobs (my day job is now at my local convenience store, KIWI). I hope I get the hang of the Art of Girlfriendery soon, because I'm beginning to learn that I'm miserable without a partner (even though the relationship failed it still felt nice to have someone to hold). So what do I do about my predicaments? I bury them under a heap of things which keep me busy (I first learned this technique from Thomas Jefferson, and it works). So on to the things which make life (or at least mine) pleasurable:

I finished reading Dawkins' The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, and I extracted some more essays from it. I also read I. Asimov: A Memoir, Asimov's third (!) autobiography (I want to read his two previous ones) and from it I learned that he's written a string of books in the vein of Words from the Myths (Words from the Exodus and Words of Science and the History behind Them for example), which I will definitely read. I've linked to the famous book Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of Nature) but I haven't read it (I don't know German well enough). However, there are tons of pretty, high-resolution images, which are absolutely wonderful. I also bought a huge hardback volume of all of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and I'm paying keen attention when I read, looking for that phrase, "Elementary, my dear Watson", which, apparently, is found nowhere in the stories.

I've populated my Essays page with more essays. They are "Seven Wonders" (Lewis Thomas), an extract from The Periodic Table (Primo Levi), "Can We Really Know the Universe?" (Sagan), "A Skeptical View of Karl Popper" (Martin Gardner), and "Mr. X" (Sagan), all thoroughly excellent in their own ways.

I learned of (and linked to) two excellent web comics, AmazingSuperPowers and A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible.

I'm coming around to liking the PS3 a lot better than the 360. It's a common enough comment that the 360 has more fun games, and I accept that to a degree, but I really like the PS3's Trophy system a lot better than the 360's Achievement system. On the 360 all of your Achievements give you Gamer Points, which are accumulated into one big heap. The PS3's trophies, by comparison, are divided into four categories, scaled by difficulty of attainment: bronze, silver, gold, and platinum (usually given when all other trophies are collected). In addition, your profile levels up as you collect trophies, making for a neat RPG meta-game (I like to say that I don't play PS3 games, I play PS3). I've thrown up my PSN handle (Hermiene) on the Contact page.

On my Links page I've linked to Jeff Dee, Golly, and The Vault. Also, there are no longer images on the page.

I've played a number of games, but Fallout 3 has been my obsession.

In LittleBigPlanet I've gotten all trophies but the ones requiring you to build levels and play community levels. I want to sink some time into doing just that, but I need a good idea for a level. The community levels which are there already, however, are truly excellent.

I played Gears of War 2 with Even all the way through in co-op mode, which was epic. GoW 2 is just more of the same from GoW, but if you like the original you'll love the sequel.

The reason I bought Dead Space, I admit, was because of the name of the protagonist, Isaac Clarke. (Wouldn't it sound lame, by the way, if he was named Arthur Asimov?) It's an ok game, but not as scary as it could have been. System Shock 2 is still the king of the scary derelict spaceships hill. One of the damning points of the game is that it has such awesome zero-g, yet there's so little of it. (I have all the trophies for it.)

The ill-named Prince of Persia is pretty fun for a while, but the highlight of the series is still PoP 3D and The Two Thrones. There's nothing truly memorable in Prince of Persia the way there is in PoP 3D (climbing the huge dirigible) and The Two Thrones (climbing the Tower of Babel). The newest game does have awesome banter, though. (I have all the trophies for it.)

Now, Fallout 3 is truly epic. I've finished it once, playing Good (reaching about level 15), and I'm now playing it again, playing Evil (I've reached level 20, which is the level cap, and I have the Explorer perk, which gives me all the Map Markers). The Capital Wasteland (post-apocalyptic Washinton D.C.) is huge and there are so many places to explore that I didn't know about on my first playthrough, when I lacked the Explorer perk. The only complaint I have is that because it's so huge and you spend so much time wandering around, the radio channels you normally have available to you (Galaxy News Radio and Enclave Radio) quickly become boring (though on the positive side I now know many of the songs GNR plays by heart, and I love them). Fallout 3 really captures the atmosphere of a broken humanity struggling to rebuild, especially because of the cities, which are ad-hoc but plausible (one is built out of scrap metal from an abandoned air strip around an un-detonated nuclear bomb, another is built on the slope of a broken bridge, a third is built in the corridors of a split hangar ship).

As for my plan to install XP, Vista, and Ubuntu on my RAID-ed machine, that didn't pan out because I don't trust RAID to be stable. My current plan is instead to wait until SSD becomes cheap, and triple-boot from that.

"The love the liveliest, the life the loveliest."