Sunday, March 30, 2014

Curse You Isaac!!

Remember the movie Stranger Than Fiction?  I thought it was just an interesting idea for a story.  That is until yesterday when I realized that it was quite likely Asimov had been ghostwriting my life as contemporary short fiction from the Spirit World.  Here's how the story goes:

The Broken Clothes Dryer

Becky's dryer broke some time ago.  It didn't work and she didn't have the money to get a new one.  The dryer got scrapped.

No, that is NOT the end of the story.  I said short fiction not micro fiction.

The family hung their clean clothes on a line to dry on warm days.  Not every day is warm, especially in Indiana winters, so a respectable, if smelly, pile of laundry built up in the laundry room waiting for that warm sunny day--or perchance a new dryer.  It so happens that the new dryer came first. 

Yes, yes, you're right.  This story IS mistitled.   It should have been called The NEW Clothes Dryer.  Can I just get on with the story without further interruptions please?

We realized that I was moving in, and it turns out I own a clothes dryer!  But it is an electric dryer and Becky's old one was propane.  We decided to investigate the feasibility of installing it anyway.

I asked her if there was a 220 outlet in the room and she told me the only outlet was there right behind the washer, so I stepped up on the pile and nope, it was only a 110 outlet with a propane pipe sticking up behind it.  

Next we checked the breaker boxes.  Now I've seen a lot of breaker boxes, but never one like this.  The box stood alone in a musty cobweb covered basement just hanging there from the wires, not attached to anything.  There were no labels on it.  Nothing saying kitchen, laundry room, or furnace.  Nothing.  The wires themselves stuck out at all angles and were tangled together in some modern version of a Gordian Knot. It was hopeless. Seriously, I have never seen a breaker box like this one.  Trained monkeys, or heck untrained monkeys could have done a better job.  Additionally, there were no empty slots to add any breakers.  Rewiring was out on multiple counts.

So, look for a gas dryer it is.  Craigslist had gas dryers ranging from $25 to $1200.  Needless to say $1200 was out of range and the $25 one was 'for parts only'.  The catch is, all of the dryers were for natural gas and not propane.

Propane conversion kits vary in cost from $10-$60, depending upon the model you are converting.  They also require disassembling the whole dryer including taking the drum out before reassembling it with different orifices and vent plugs.  Doable, but fun?  Not really.

I spent several days looking for the right dryer at the right price, and we visited several good leads only to be disappointed each time.  Then finally, yesterday we found a nice looking Estate (Made by Whirlpool) in good condition.  The conversion kit for it was $16.49.  

Good enough.  Bought dryer.  Brought home.

In the meantime, Becky had cleared out the laundry room.  Melissa, Becky, and I spent an hour and a half disassembling, modifying, and reassembling the dryer.  The drum was finally back on right, the ignitor was in place without being broken, and even the door shut.  Time to hook it up and dry some clothes!  I turned around to do just that.

There on the clean floor, where once had been a two foot pile of clothes was a.....220 outlet.

I wanted to cry.

Anyone need a dryer?

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Galveston Bay

This post is going to be a little sadder than usual. Recently roughly 168,000 gallons of oil was spilled in Galveston Bay in Texas. This is especially terrible because, since it is so near to land, the saltwater marshes that are critical to the ecosystem are in danger of being affected. Current cleanup is trying to keep the oil away from the marshes, because the oil will suffocate the saltwater grasses. Not only would this have an effect on the ecosystem, wildlide, and fisheries (and thus the local economy), the grass dying means the land held by their roots will simply drift away, making Texas smaller. In addition, the impact of storms from sea will be worse, as saltwater marshes serve to weaken them. To make matters worse, the spill happened just as birds were migrating through the region.

Monday, March 24, 2014

Your Imagination

Prompt: Explain this term.
Sources: Your Imagination

Love you all!

Richard

Sunday, March 23, 2014

I Know We are Your Chosen People but Once in a While Couldn't You Choose Someone Else

If you can't tell, I'm watching Fiddler on the Roof.  Tevya's calamities are front and center at this point in the movie.  Of course we all probably have enough of our own.  So what if I write about something else entirely?

Thank you everyone for coming up to Indiana!  It was good to see everyone.  :)

This is definitely going to be a rambling post.

I'd never even heard of Clymene dolphins until your post Andrew.  Becky and I did see something I've never seen before though.  We were hiking to Abrams Falls.  It is a 5 mile round trip hike over a couple of mountains or three which seemed like double the distance it actually was.  On the way we decided to wade the river.... It was freezing cold and other hikers looked at us like we were crazy.

Another time we stopped by the river again...and noticed a large rainbow trout sticking head up out of the water at an odd angle.  It just seemed to stay there.

Then next thing we noticed the trout head was gone and an otter head was sticking out of the river at the same place!  We watched him dance around and play in the water for a while.  Over all it was a great hike but I realized that I'm definitely approaching half a century in age by the time it was over. ;).


Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Clymene Dolphin

I'm just going to do a quick little post about the clymene dolphin, a very interesting dolphin because it seems to be a hybrid species.

Now, hybrid species tend to be rare. This is because it need two species to be able to breed and produce viable offspring, and breed enough for a new population but infrequently enough to be considered separate species rather than subspecies. In addition, the hybrids then have to prefer mating with each other rather than either of the two species, thus making it truly a species in its own right. Hybrid species are exceptionally rare among marine mammals, with the clymene dolphin being the only one science knows about currently.

The clymene dolphin seems to be a mixture of the spinner dolphin and the striped dolphin. Interestingly, clymene dolphins' have nucleic dna which is more similar to the spinner dolphin and mitochondrial dna which is more similar to the striped dolphin, which is what provides the evidence that it is a hybrid species.

This is most spectacular because not only is this a rare evolutionary process that has hardly ever been observed while all three species are alive, but it is also occurring among more advanced (evolutionarily speaking) animals, which makes it all the more incredible that we get to witness it.

Spinner Dolphin
Clymene Dolphin
Striped Dolphin

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Internet Nostalgia

        


Whatever happened to the days when the internet was wild and free--a world where anything was possible as long as you built it yourself?  Do you yearn for that long lost world of chaos, link farms, and blinking page backgrounds; a place where anyone's page could be one of the top search results?  Don't you miss an internet that was a true maze of unknown worlds to explore and where no one knew you were a dog?  It didn't matter if you were a multibillion dollar corporation or a seven year old kid.  No one knew how this new world would work and everyone seemed to have an equal chance to grab and hold attention.  There was largely a spirit of cooperation as you built.  People helped each other and while there were trolls out there, they weren't prolific enough that anyone felt the need to create a name for trolling yet.  It was what Asimov called a cusp time--anything was possible.

On the other hand, the old internet was static and along with the chaos came....well chaos.  Search engine results?  No one had a particularly great algorithm yet for searching through the mounds of stuff.  EVERYTHING was there, but where?  Link farms existed because we needed them.   Because anyone who played with terms and configuration long enough could optimize a site to be a top search result, the results were comparatively meaningless.  Also it was SLOW.  I mean we were listening to midi files for crying out loud.  Not because this was the best we could do as far as digital media went either.  We had mp3s, they just took hours to download.....

What have we made of the internet?  Is it a better place now or worse?  For me the answer is ... both.  Of course that may be a cop out, but I think it's true.  We have lost some of the wild west and renaissance spirit while gaining order, technical advancement, and maturity.   This means I can now watch streaming video, but also that net neutrality is going out the window as isps have inexorably moved from AOL vs a myriad of small local startups to the mega corporations of Comcast and Time Warner vs no one at all.  It means that Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr et al have codified a place and language for people to use to communicate but in providing and codifying this, they have defined, shaped, and proscribed the conversation and experience itself--possibilities which were there are now gone or at least less likely for the time being.  Power seems to tend towards amalgamation.  With that comes order and sometimes expanded technology, but also loss of freedom, higher prices (for access) and, a different kind of danger.

What do you think of the progression of the internet since the early days?

While you're thinking.... do you remember any of this?  








Saturday, March 1, 2014

Twitchy

My roommate Wil introduced me to a new phenomena. On the surface, it seems to be a basic emulator of a classic game, Pokémon Red. But delve inside, and you find a story of civilizations of order and anarchy, betrayal, torture, and triumph. A hundred thousand souls fighting gladiatorial battle under the cruel gaze of the goddess called Chance.

Twitch.tv is a channel where, if you're tired of playing video games yourself, you can watch other people play video games in real time. They play and sometimes talk while they play, and you watch them play and sometimes write a comment in the side chat bar.

I know. I'd put it beneath "sorting uno cards by closest prime number" on my to-do list as well.

But somebody got innovative, and Python'd up our beloved Pokémon Red so that the chat window is routed directly to the game's controls. I type "left" in the chat window, Red takes a step to the left. Problem is, if any one of the several thousand people also watching this game type "right" he takes a step to the right.

So what was once the story of a spunky up-and-coming Pokemon master becomes the tale of a child possessed by a hundred thousand souls all desperately clawing for control over his mind and body. This is Twitch Plays Pokémon.

Sounds fun!

When I looked up this stat, TPP had:
120,000 Simultaneous participants.
19 million unique views.

Although the emulator mimics the game perfectly, the opensource control mechanics transform the game into something wildly different. There are only a few controls (D-Pad, A, B, Start, Select) but since there are thousands and thousands of people entering them simultaneously, our little protagonist Red looks like a seizure ward's annual disco ball and strobe light festival.  He goes up, down, start menu, tries to use an unusable item, tries to use an unusable item , tries to use an unusable item, goes left, goes down, goes right, ad infinitum.

Every command entered is streamed in a queue into the emulator. The number of commands and a 40 second delay before your typed command hits the screen makes trying to consciously control Red comparable to trying to type an article by throwing paper airplanes at a keyboard in  30 mile an hour winds.  But if you have enough paper airplanes… Indeed, perhaps the most common metaphor applied to Twitch Plays Pokémon is the infinite Shakespeare monkeys and their literary designs.

It's interesting to see the difficulty of various tasks be inverted. Finding the time to level up your Pokemon becomes irrelevant when there are thousands of people playing, literally 24/7. Conversely, incredibly trivial tasks became insanely difficult obstacles. With the chaos of inputs, just getting Red to go in the right direction was difficult. If the right direction includes more than one turn or a path along a ledge, insanely difficult becomes nigh-impossible. For example,  in front of one gym right above a ledge, TPP spent 24 consecutive hours trying to walk into a building.

They spent so much time accidentally jumping down ledges that they had just spent 6 hours climbing up, that some began to wonder if Red had found a new life purpose. As one fan wrote in a parody letter to Prof Oak:

“Dear Oak, Its been 3 days since i started this journey. And you know what? Screw becoming a pokemon master. I am going to be ledge jumping master. I been training 8 hour a day. send my love to mom. signed Red Ledge jumper.”


To counteract the randomness, the amassed thousands organized themselves. They made websites with strawpolls about major decisions, made a google-doc[1] to announce the current goal and record their stats, outlining plans for navigating the complex challenges of walking, fighting battles, and catching pokemon[2]. They even made their own subreddit.  The spontaneous order had a surprising effect on the game.

Not only did they make significant-- and frankly astounding-- progress, the quirks and oddities of the game took on a life of their own in the memes of the fan pages. Their starter, a charmeleon named "ABBBBBBK (" they affectionately nicknamed "Abby" while a rattata named "JLVWNNOOOO" was dubbed "Jay Leno".  The start menu opened and closed constantly, and one random item, the Helix Fossil, was checked so much that players decided Red must be consulting the Helix for guidance. Soon they were convinced that Red was on a quest to resurrect the fossilized god Helix, and to triumph over the evil dark Dome fossil.

But this being the internet, not everyone wanted Red to progress. On top of the randomness element, TPP had to fight against trolls who would willingly sabotage any current goal. So if Red had to walk along a long edge for 10 or 15 steps, all it took was for one troll to manage a "down" command, and a hundred thousand people would scream in agony as they watched Red jump a ledge and destroy hours of effort. To a troll, enraging an audience of thousands on a livestream game with a single button input is the scent of sweet lamb's blood on the morning breeze. Some people just want to watch the world burn.

But as bad as the trolls were, the pure randomness was worse. At the PC, the players accidentally released Abby, their starter pokemon, and Jay Leno, never to return (releasing your starter pokemon is something you should never EVER do). This past Sunday was named "Bloody Sunday" when they accidentally released 12 pokemon, several of them high-leveled.

At one point, they had reached a section of the game where they could not progress without precision movement, and the designer introduced a new mechanic "Democracy", where the responses would be summed up every 10 seconds or so, and the most popular would be followed. Many players rebelled at this mid-game change, interfering with the goal or typing "start9" which would open the start menu nine times in a row.

So the designer tweaked the game again, allowing players to type in the chat to vote for "anarchy" (the original setup) or "democracy". When there was a 75% majority of one, it switched the control method.

As time went on, the mythos and politics became more complicated, and the stakes higher. Anarchists fought to uphold the purity of their traditional gameplay, and reviled against the new democracy, calling it "Dome-ocracy" (i.e. pertaining to the evil Dome fossil). Democracists maintained that slow and steady was necessary for sections requiring delicate control. But it was so slow and a good deal more boring.




Factions divided by Anarchy/Democracy or different paths and game choices got pretty riled up at times. Epics of governments and rebellion, religion and destiny were enacted in the following of the Helix fossil. Here is one of my favorites: the story false prophet Eevee, as told by a player:

In order to progress we needed a Pokémon that can learn surf. We had 5 of our 6 Pokémon slots full, so if we bought, caught, or obtained a Pokémon, it would go into that sixth slot. Eevee if evolved into Vaporeon works. Or we could be given Lapras which works. Or they could catch a Pokémon which is super hard to coordinate with 70k users. If eevee evolved into a non surf learning pokemon, we'd have to go to the pokemon PC to get a surf pokemon out of storage. We picked Eevee, evolved it into the flareon, tried to go to the box, and released two of our pokemon, including a starter, and deposited the helix fossil, which is being revered as a sort of God. If we didn't go with Eevee, we may still have our two released pokemon and our God. Instead, the false prophet killed them.



Wow. Just wow.



Saturday morning, around 5am, after 16d 7h 45m 30s, the collective hive mind finally defeated the Final Four, and beat the game.




[2]
Hello everyone!

I want to post about books today (and kids, of course). You see, I went to the library today to pick up some children's books I had on hold. They were all books I had never read before, and I was pretty excited. I had very high hopes of using them for my weekly lesson plan. Some delivered, others did not. This led me to wonder: What makes a good children's book?

A while ago Dad and I had a discussion about some of his ideas for potential children's books. Since then, I've been paying a lot of attention to the reading interactions that take place in my classroom. I must admit that many of the books that I loved myself, my class was less than thrilled over (until I read the book to them so many times that they actually started to enjoy it. Turns out the dynamics of pressuring work differently when it comes to teeny kids...) It is also true that many books I found merely okay, they absolutely loved. I'm sure we're all familiar with some of the reading techniques that work, and I truly believe that a good reading can make a less than stellar book interesting and engaging for children (the opposite being true as well). But what aspects in a book facilitate this process?

Two things I think are important (based solely on anecdotal experience):

Relatability to characters/accessibility of story--The reader (or listener/audience) has to be able to connect with the story on some level. One of the books I checked out from the library failed in this category. The girl in the story was worrying about boys and what to do with her hair, but she was supposed to early elementary school age....? Age and interests are very important. One of the books I didn't expect my kids to like (Harriet You'll Drive Me Wild), they ended up absolutely loving because they could relate to the story of a young girl always getting in trouble with adults.

Some element of interaction-- Not all books have this built in. Often, it's the job of the reader to find ways to engage the listeners in the story. But books do make this easier or harder. Good examples are books that have open questions (Brown Bear, Brown Bear) or follow recognizable patterns (We're Going on a Bear Hunt) that allow kids to chime in. Also, books that have the kids interact physically with the story by copying movements (From Head to Toe) or simply lifting flaps.

There are lots of other factors that are important for the story (matching length and attention span, rhythm and rhyme, etc), not to mention the illustration (I'm not even touching on that).  So what do you guys think? What is a picture book you really enjoyed from your childhood (or adulthood)? What did/do you like about it?