Geek Like Me

Fri, 28 Oct 2005 Veronica Year One

Tomorrow, our little daughter will have her first birthday. One year of Veronica Ruth in the big wide world! Plus those early formative months in the womb, although she was not nearly as much fun then. Grace said something the other day about just how strange it was that a year ago, she wasn't around. It is somewhat mind-blowing. She seems too real to have not been in existence before that. So where was she? It is just as mysterious when people leave the world. It doesn't seem possible that they could be here and then not here so abruptly, but that is indeed the mystery we are confronted with. She will have to confront it too.

Lightening up a bit... Vera is doing great, although she is a constant challenge. She is fond of climbing, so she has a considerable number of bruises. We've tried to make the house fairly baby-proof, but she will climb anything. She has a lot of new skills. She is not speaking clearly, but she stuck a metal CD rack in my face and said "Daddy, eat it!" Grace asked her once if she would like some more food, and she said "That would be lovely." I'm not claiming her pronounciation would be clear to anyone else, but we understood her. This was at ten and a half or eleven months. She doesn't generally speak when you want her to, although she will typically answer questions with "yeah." She chants "ma-ma-ma-ma" as a kind of mantra while playing.

The sign language has not gone as well: she has not learned very many signs yet, and does not use them regularly, so maybe like she skipped crawling, she will skip signing. We are also not very consistent about using the signs. She still loves her They Might Be Giants DVD, and will dance whenever she hears "Alphabet of Nations" or "Clap Your Hands." Or even if we sing it to her and clap. She can clap along. She also manipulates objects in more sophisticated ways. She can't assemble duplo blocks yet, but the other day she had a cardboard box that was open on both ends, and sat and repeatedly put blocks in one and and watched them slide out the other.

I am also coming to the close of the second week of my new job, as a senior software engineer with Lectronix. I am very pleased to be rid of my tedious commute! The new office is only a couple of miles from home, and I may even be able to bike. I even have windows and an office with a door! Heaven. The work is interesting as well, although I am just starting to learn about the embedded platforms and tools. In addition, we should have health coverage again! That can't come soon enough. Medicaid is still bouncing all of Veronica's bills, and some of this paperwork is now almost a year old. They kept sending letters threatening to cut off coverage, with no explanation as to what we had done wrong, and Grace was not able to get a call back. We may wind up just having to eat about a thousand dollars worth of well-baby visits and immuninizations for the past year. Grace has also had some problems with her teeth, and it appeared she might need surgery. On top of that there is her gall bladder, which probably needs to be removed.

In the week between the end of my MicroMax/Visteon job and the start of this one, we were able to take a couple of days off and go up north, to Grand Marais on Lake Superior. Isaac had never been. The trip was beautiful, but too short. And too much driving! With stops, the return trip took over twelve hours. Road construction and endless traffic backups didn't help any. But the U.P. was beautiful. It turned out to be kind of an adventure: we met Governor Granholm in Grand Marais, who was visiting a community meeting to talk, in part, about the harbor breakwall, its state of disrepair and the need for funds to repair it. So we have pictures of Isaac shaking the governor's hand.

I am continuing to occupy my mind with a little bit of reading, in what little free time I can find, and am trying to take a more active role in Isaac's homeschooling. We are reviewing geometry and narrowing in on techniques he's forgotten over the summer, and he is also doing fraction drills. Although I am always hesitant to give him easy drill work, he seems to enjoy it, and at his age he can use all the basic technique work he can get, as long as we also try to move him forward. Isaac is also continuing in the Ann Arbor Boy Choir (a choir boy and an altar boy) and joining a more advanced singing group. I must go... they are performing tonight! It is going to be a busy weekend!

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Fri, 26 Aug 2005 Dead Turtles

When I came home from work last night, after spending nearly 90 minutes to go 32 miles, I found that the kitchen sink was full of hot water that had backed up from the dishwasher, which was running.

And in the sink were my three turtles, Giblet, Bubba, and Sluggo.

Dead.

Having undergone some combination of scalding and drowning.

Isaac had been feeding the turtles, at my request, but wandered off to play and left them there, for I-don't-know-how-long. Grace was busy with the baby.

The backing-up of the dishwasher drainage into the sink happens commonly, and can be fixed by running the disposal or making sure the plug is firmly stuck in place.

It was a bad idea to feed the turtles while the dishwasher was running. And an even worse idea not to keep an eye on them and notice when the water started to back up, and stuff the plug back in, or run the disposal to clear the blockage (the turtles are much too big to go down the drain). Or take them out.

I did not know that the water was hot or that they were dead, and so we yelled for Isaac to come finish feeding them.

This is where it gets weird.

He drained out the water, rinsed them off like he is supposed to, and put them back in the tank. Apparently not noticing, or deciding to not bother to mention to us, that they were dead -- two completely limp, and one stiff. Not moving. Eyes closed. Bubba with his mouth open looking like he was in agony.

Which he probably had been.

Isaac has been feeding them for a while now, and has a lot of experience with them now... he knows that they hate being handled, and always try to wriggle their way free. It is not normal for them to have their eyes closed, for Bubba's neck and limbs to be sticking out stiffly, and for Bubba and Giblet's heads to be flopping loosely.

It was an accident, but accidents happen a lot less often to the observant and attentive. Isaac's response was just surreal, but the lesson we are trying to teach him from this is that being an observant person, paying attention, and taking responsibility for the helpless are the most important things we can teach him.

We are not giving Isaac a specific punishment, because this is at least partially an accident, although he felt the need to ground himself for a few days.

A brief eulogy for three turtles:

Turtles aren't pets in the same sense that cats or dogs are pets. You can't really train them much. They don't adjust to being handled; they don't like it. They are mostly for watching. Graceless and awkward on land, they are remarkably agile in the water. When they are not swimming around looking for food, they either lie on the bottom of the tank or bask on a rock. Occasionally I would even find all three of them stacked up, in order, from largest (Giblet) to smallest (Bubba), but if they saw me move, they would immediately jump back in the water. Oddly, although they are normally very shy, when I practiced my guitar, they would line up and appear to be watching me. Baby Veronica loved to watch them. They are relatively low-maintenance pets; unlike fish, they thrive in plain tap water, and with a large-capacity filter unit with a biological "waterfall" attached, I did not need to change the water very often. Since I am allergic to most furry pets, they were just about the ideal pet for me.

Giblet, a female red-eared slider, was purchased by my brother Brian perhaps seven years ago when she was tiny, about the size of a silver dollar. He kept her for a while, but she was not thriving; her tank did not have a proper heater and tank filtration, and Brian was over-extended with two children and several other pets to cope with. So, I took over Giblet's care and brought her to Ann Arbor. She grew, and grew, and grew some more, until she was about the size of a dinner plate. Her hobbies were basking, stealing food from the other turtles, and occasionally climbing out of the tank and hiding in obscure corners of our apartment. She bit me on several occasions, once drawing blood. She was mean, and you got the sense that she would eat you if she could, but she did a good job at being a turtle. Turtles can live fifty years or more with proper care. She might have lived several decades more, and she might even have outlived me.

I purchased Sluggo, a male red-eared slider, as a companion to Giblet. She was very small, and I did not want her companion to be large enough to take her head off while they were eating together, so I found the smallest turtle I could find. He was still quite a bit larger than Giblet. Now the tables have turned, and she is much larger. When I got Sluggo, I thought he was young, but it seems that he was the full-grown runt of the litter. He had a parasite and a soft shell. I was able to remove the "slug" (hence his name) and harden up his shell by feeding him turtle mineral supplements, although it remained somewhat distorted as it grew. He improved under my care, but always behaved kind of strangely; he seemed terrified of everything, including his own food. He seemed to have a neurological problem and his claws would sometimes twitch violently. Amazingly, he managed to fertilize Giblet several times, although the eggs always got eaten before we could collect them. He must have had a traumatic childhood, but did come out of his shell, so to speak, under my care. Sluggo did his best at being a turtle. I am glad that I was able to improve his life a little bit.

I purchased Bubba, a yellow musk or mud turtle, to keep Giblet and Sluggo company. He was more friendly, and his was shaped such that it always appeared to have an affable grin on it, hence his name. He had a remarkably long neck, which he could stick out to an absurd length. Instead of basking on the rocks, he enjoyed lying on the bottom of the tank and occasionally extending his neck all the way to the top, where his nostrils would just barely break the surface, to sip some air. He had an interesting hinged plastron. He developed a strange lump on his foot, and I was afraid it was some kind of tumor, but it went away after I put a sulfa antibiotic for turtles in the tank. He was not able to bite nearly as hard as Giblet or Sluggo, and resisted less when being carried to and from his dinner. He seemed a little bit more intelligent, although that is pretty subjective. Bubba was a great turtle. I'll miss him the most.

We did not bury them; they went into the dumpster. We don't have a good place to bury them, and I couldn't bear the idea of having a funeral for pets which are not even mammals. But they will be remembered. This weekend I will be dismantling the tank. I'm not going to replace them.

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Installer VISE

Installer VISE has a good reputation as one of the best packages for building installers, but apparently that is not saying much... it is really pretty awkward to use, and the documentation is weak.

It is like writing a program in a conventional language where all the actual behavior is hidden. Like: what the conditionals actually say; how comparisons are done (what constitutes true and false); not being able to evaluate any kind of previous step for success or failure without introducing a superfluous variable test item; not being able to actually manage types and perform type coercion yourself; not being able to actually manage strings yourself... ugh.

It does supply quite a bit of behavior for you, though, which would be quite awkward if you had to write it all yourself. Oh well...

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Wed, 17 Aug 2005 Hump Day in Hell Week

This week Grace is attending an insurance sales class in Lansing. This means that our pattern for the summer so far -- in which I get up Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at about 6, and leave about 7, and Grace and Isaac get up after I leave -- is all scrambled. Now we're getting up at 5 and we're both commuting. Veronica and Isaac are both getting sitters or day care, and Grace is pumping milk for her. Although Vera likes day care (she loves to play with other babies), when I come home it reminds her that Grace is not there, so she starts to cry "mama" and is very hard to distract. By that point I badly need a nap. She seems to be on strike as far as drinking her mom's milk from a bottle goes (although she is eating and drinking other food before Grace gets home, and nursing when Grace gets back). All the pumping isn't going to waste, exactly, since it is relieving Grace's engorgement and ensuring that she will keep up milk production, but now we seem to have an oversupply that the baby won't drink.

Meanwhile, we're all recovering from a nasty cold/sinus infection. Veronica fortunately seems to have stopped throwing up on Grace and the bed during the night, and no longer has a high fever. My cough is just about gone. In addition to comforting Veronica in the couple of hours between the time I get home and Grace gets home, helping Grace get some dinner on the table and clean up afterwards, I'm also trying to complete a consulting project, writing a Windows installer. To help make sure neither of us drives off the road after waking up at 5 following a night of broken sleep, we are trying to get to bed by nine. That isn't working terribly well. Grace just had her fuel pump replaced, and her van now smells like gas, so there may be a leak somewhere, as if she didn't have enough to worry about, without the fear that the van will blow up or catch on fire.

Fortunately, it is Wednesday already, so the crazy week will be done soon, and perhaps we can get back into a routine. Veronica will get her mom back. With luck and some concentration I can finish this consulting gig successfully, which will pay for Grace's class and the day care this week, and also make it through the next month at Visteon. Grace will take her licensing exam and with luck pass it, which will make the class worthwhile. Veronica will make it to ten months, Isaac will get through the week without losing his mind, and everything will be back to normal... just in time for me to start worrying again about what I'm going to do when this temporary work assignment ends, around October... Urgh...

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Tue, 02 Aug 2005 Veronica at Nine

Our baby girl is nine months old. She is now walking pretty well, although with that hilarious arms-out, tottering side-to-size zombie gait. She says "mama" fairly clearly and makes the sign for "nurse." What she doesn't do anymore, though, is fall alseep without a fight, no matter how exhausted she is. She will only take very brief "power naps" during the day. At night, we practically have to sit on her until she gives up the struggle, and then she goes out like a light. She's also less content to sleep on her own bed, and wakes up wanting to get back in our bed.

She's got approximately four teeth at different stages. She chases down and eats ants. Her other hobbies lately are "freestyle nursing" in which she wiggles and contorts herself into all kinds of crazy positions while nursing, causing Grace no end of pain.

We've been watching the They Might Be Giants DVD of alphabet songs, "Here Comes the ABCs." We've also just gotten a baby sign language video, so we'll see how that goes. Sleep is not quite so easy to come by these days, but I can still usually get at least four or five continuous hours and another hour or so of broken sleep, which is enough to get by, so we aren't too bad off. And she's a lot of fun to play with. One of my favorite games is the "rasberry contest." I usually get tired of it first, so I guess she wins!

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On Print Heads

I've written before about my experience with my HP Business Inkjet 1100D printer. I was, for the most part, quite happy with it. However, recently the black printhead failed.

The Business Inkjet design separates the ink cartridge from the print heads. One would think that this might reduce waste and cost. The ink cartridges still cost a lot of money, though. The idea was that the print heads would last much longer than the ink cartridge - thousands and thousands of pages. According to PC World, "HP estimates that the black print head will last for 16,000 pages, and the color print heads for 24,000 pages each."

Well, that didn't happen. I haven't kept a page count, but I haven't even finished a second ream of paper, and a few 25-packs or 50-packs of photo paper. I doubt I've printed more than 2,000 pages.

Now, when an ink cartridge fails, you can still print; you'll just lose a color. Of course, if this is black, that can be a big inconvenience, but ink cartridges are usually in stock at office supply chains. However, when the print head fails, you can't print a single page: the printer just refuses to do anything. I found out the hard way that because they supposedly last such a long time, the chain stores don't carry the print heads; they are a special-order item. The salesperson at Office Max was quite surprised when I brought back my print head, and tested it out in another printer. It was kaput. And just out of warranty. And my printer was completely out of commission, while I had to wait a week for the new print head to arrive.

So, I have reservations about recommending the 1100/1200 series printers. There is the irregular print area on the back of the page versus the front when duplexing. Although color photos can look pretty stunning on expensive photo paper, printing out grayscale photographs results in pictures that look greenish.

Maybe my print head failure was just an anomaly, but the cost of replacing printheads and ink cartridges is starting to add up. Are there any decent, reliable inkjet printers that produce fast and sharp text, excellent photos, and that aren't obscenely expensive to operate? The reviews of the 1200D I've seen are not encouraging -- it seems that it is not an improvement over the 1100D model, so I probably don't want to pick one up for my mom, although that was the model I was considering. I've always been an HP fan, but is it time to consider another manufacturer?

(My 1100 can duplex, but this is a feature I've rarely used, so I would not consider it an important selling point. Ethernet, however, would be welcome, since trying to share the printer with my Airport Express has led to poor results, including a lot of photo print jobs that stalled out and failed; this does not seem to be HP's fault, though).

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On Firefly

I love Firefly. I've watched all the episodes at least twice, and I'm looking forward to the release of the Firefly movie this fall.

Lately, though, I've been contemplating the show's structure, and its strengths and weaknesses as storytelling and science fiction. I'm not going to dissect the whole thing now, but one thing that has stuck in my mind is that in the world of Firefly, no accomodation is made at all to the reality of vast interstellar distances. The ship Serenity can travel between planets in a matter of a few days; I think the longest journey time they mention is a month. But there is never any mention of faster-than-light travel. It's as if Einstein was just wrong in that world. Actually, the ship never even seems to accelerate very hard -- the crew and passengers don't have acceleration couches -- so apparently they don't believe in Newton, either!

Now, I have to say, I love Kaylee and her approach to spaceship drive repair -- "that part doesn't do much anyway; you can just rip it out." I love the beautiful Firefly effect. I love the narrow escape from the Reavers in the pilot, where they ignite the engine in the atmosphere and create a huge reaction. I love that explosions in space are silent. I love the fact that most aspects of life in the Firefly world are very low-tech. Firefly is "about the strawberry" -- the Preacher's bribe to Kaylee. It is a human story of loss and longing on a harsh frontier where the amenities of old Earth are rare and valuable, and life is cheap.

I don't want Firefly to be Star Trek -- an unrealistic world where there is no dirt, universal socialism and abundance seems to be the order of the day (people don't even seem to use money), and there are apparently no "have-nots." Human nature seems to have irrevocably changed in the world of Star Trek -- is anyone convinced by this future? But I think it frustrates the viewer not to at least have some ready excuses available for all the various laws of physics that get left by the wayside.

On Serenity, the crew seems to have instantaneous radio communication available between planets, or while they are nearing a planet. They've got some equivalent of interstellar wi-fi. When approaching a ship or planet they can hold conversations with other people with pretty-much instantaneous response times; they don't have to wait a few minutes for the reply to come. Even the round trip from the earth to the sun would be something like 14 minutes. They don't even invoke some kind of alternate technology like "subspace."

It is as if they just compressed the universe by a factor of billions; different planets seem to be closer together than the planets of our solar system. It is 240,000 miles to the moon and takes several days to get there with Apollo technology, and even assuming drive technology we haven't invented yet, it would take a year or more to get to Mars: the distance to Mars varies from about 35 million to 260 million miles. And think of how long it has taken Pioneer just to get out to the edge of the solar system.

Maybe the magical Firefly drive can do all this: accelerate the ship far beyond lightspeed, cancel gravity and inertia, and generate cool special effects as well. That seems a little much, though.

The Serenity also has a strange habit of coming upon other ships, as they wander about in "empty space" on routes designed to avoid being detected by the Alliance. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Serenity can also apparently be taken into "atmo" and landed on a planet, apparently without worrying about burning up on re-entry. But yet the ship looks like it is made of materials that are available today: steel plating, prone to rust and all that. The situation with the space shuttle now shows how tricky that kind of thing is in real life. There is one funny moment (I think it is in "Shindig") where the pilot, Wash, has to struggle to correct his entry trajectory, but when I watch this I keep thinking about how the physics don't make a lot of sense. At that speed, if he made such a dramatic error in the ship's angle of approach, they would burn up or break up before anyone had time to react. (Think space shuttle Columbia.)

That said, I still enjoy the show, and hope it can be resurrected in some form. It is ultimately about human relationships, but ignoring both Einstein and Newton without even bothering to offer a hand-waving sidestep to the laws of physics just grates on me a little; it seems insulting to the viewer. There is an especially funny line in "Objects in Space" when Zoe is speaking to Wash about River:

Wash: "Psychic, though? That sounds like something out of science fiction."

Zoe: "We live in a spaceship, dear."

Yep, they live in a spaceship, but some things are just silly!

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Wed, 06 Jul 2005 Handling SREC files with Ruby

Ruby is definitely one of my favorite languages, and I am far more comfortable with it than I am with Perl. It seems very expressive; very frequently, once I find the right library method, the code pretty much writes itself.

However, just like with Perl, there is more than one way to do it, so I often find myself looking for more appropriate idioms for the task at hand. There is also some question of efficiency; I'm not trying to optimize prematurely, but the program I'm working on runs slower than I'd like, and I think Ruby can do better.

To start, I'll just share one quick annoyance. The first is that there is some deficiency in handling of typing such that statements like

puts "Checksum: " + chksm

will not work; you get a run-time error (can't convert Fixnum into String)." This seems wrong; it is not very "DWIM" (do what I mean) when considered in light of Ruby's philosophy of weak "duck typing" -- if it quacks, for all practical purposes your program can treat it as a duck, or in this case a string. I bring this up because I keep getting this error -- I have a habit of forgetting to add .to_s to the variable. I'm thinking in terms of C++ iostreams, where the type is taken care of using the stream << operator.

But on to a meatier question. I want to be able to treat a string containing ASCII hex digits as an array of bytes or as a Fixnum (where I can specify the byte ordering). For example, I want to be able to turn

"DEADBEEF" into an array of unsigned integers [0xDE, 0xAD, 0xBE, 0xEF] (for purposes of generating a bytwise checksum), or into the unsigned integers 0xDEAD, 0xDEADBE, or 0xDEADBEEF (depending on the record type I'm working on).

These are the ASCII character values (exprssed in hex); 'D' is decimal 68, hex 44. Not very useful; I get 2 strings of ASCII hex out. These aren't very useful for translation, since I'd have to turn them into integers, translate them to numeric values (not just a simple offset, because the hex characters are not contiguous) and then assemble the high and low nybbles into byte values using (high << 4) + low, or some such.

There must be a better way to do this. Here's my first try:

def make_checksum (str)
  checksum = 0
  0.step(str.length - 1, 2) { |idx|
    checksum += (str[idx].chr.hex * 16) + (str[idx + 1].chr.hex)
  }
  return (~checksum) & 0xFF
end

Ugh. Look at the way I have to access the characters: str[idx] returns numeric types, not character types, which don't have a hex() method, so I have to convert them from the original characters in the string to integers, to characters, and then apply hex() to that.

Another way is to make substrings, I suppose, but it doesn't perform better, probably because it is generating a lot of extra string objects:

def make_srec_checksum (str)
  puts "make_srec_checksum; str is: " + str
  checksum = 0
  0.step(str.length - 1, 2) { |idx|
    checksum += str[idx..(idx + 1)].hex
  }
  return (~checksum) & 0xFF
end

Another is that the String.unpack() method seemed from reading the documentation that it had exactly what I needed; it appeared that the "h" and "H" characters in the control string for the unpack method would be capable of unpacking ASCII hex data like DEADBEEF into byte values. That seems to be what unpack is all about. Instead, it generates ASCII hex bytes.

$ ruby -e 'puts "0123456789ABCDEF".unpack("H2" * 16)'

30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
41
42
43
44
45
46

Not what I wanted. Most likely, there is a much better way!

It might be interesting to compare Common Lisp and Ruby implementations of my SREC tool; how concise, yet expressive, can I be in each language? This also might serve to shed some light on whether Common Lisp has fallen behind as far as libraries for typical file-handling and scripting-type tasks. More on that later.

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A Squeak in the Wilderness

Blah blah apologies blah blah long time since I've written blah. Blah busy.

I guess I'm not much of a blogger. I was especially chagrined when my brother told me he hadn't seen anything new in a long time. I didn't even realize he was reading! Hi, Brian!

There is lots of news with baby Veronica. She is eight months old. She weighs twenty-something pounds, has one tooth, can stand briefly, "cruises" (walks with support), climbs stairs unaided, blows rasberries as a form of conversation, wrestles, giggles, sings, and dances to the theme music from "Red Dwarf." Although her main food is breast milk, she loves to eat bits of asparagus, bananas, and little bits of any kind of bread or pasta. She does not say clearly recognizable words yet (although she sort of says "hi"), but she tries to imitate words we say. We have to do much more baby-proofing than we expected. Apparently Isaac did not require very much baby proofing, but Vera moves fast, and likes to pull things off shelves. She especially loves to tear up books and eat the pages.

My time at home is considerably shorter than it was before, since I'm spending upwards of two hours commuting each weekday. When I do get home, I am spending more time chasing the baby and trying to run interference for Grace. Getting a little uninterrupted time to sit in the office to write or program has become a luxury. Grace has taken the kids camping with her sister-in-law, so I have a few free evenings.

Much more has happened; Grace's brother Ben Benjamin died without warning, and we are still in shock about that. He had undiagnosed hypertension (high blood pressure). He leaves a wife and four children, one teen-aged, two toddlers, and one small baby who was born with a dangerous heart condition and who is, happily, recovering from surgery. It makes me think hard about what Grace would do with Veronica and Isaac if something similar should happen to me. We've seen a lawyer to get complete wills drafted and I just had my physical for a new life insurance policy.

I've been working for Visteon in Dearborn, doing software testing for a satellite radio product. I'm technically a contractor on a limited- time project; hence the commute. If it turns into a permanent position we might move to Dearborn.

Meanwhile, I've not been able to do much free-time coding. I have put together a little tool in Ruby to do some assorted processing on SREC files. The SREC format is used in embedded software to hold downloadable code segments. The original file format seems to be attributable to Motorola, although there seem to be a lot of variants floating around. It started out as a tool to scratch a personal itch: the need to merge multiple SREC files. If you have a particular problem you need to solve with SREC files, get in touch (paul@thepottshouse.org). I'll talk a bit more about this program in another entry.

I had planned to do some work in Common Lisp and/or Scheme while Grace and the children were away, but it turns out that I procrastinated too long, since she cut her trip a week short to return to Ann Arbor for her brother's funeral. She is taking another trip in early July, though, so if I can avoid procrastination, perhaps I will have something to show. It might be interesting to compare Common Lisp and Ruby implementations of my SREC tool; how concise, yet expressive, can I be in each language? This also might serve to shed some light on whether Common Lisp has fallen behind as far as libraries for typical file-handling and scripting-type tasks.

I haven't written about the war in Iraq or other political issues in some time. It doesn't seem that very much has changed except the daily details.

By any fact-based measure, America is not succeeding. Even rational Republicans are wavering. But Bush did not offer any changes in strategy. Bush's prime-time address last night boiled down, basically, to more of the same: "there was some connection between 9/11 and Iraq," "we're winning," and "we're not leaving before we've won." Oh, and "we can continue to win this war on the cheap, without increasing troop strength, and without sacrificing the tax cuts." Also, that there is no viable plan to get more assistance from the U.N. or from other nations, and apparently no movement on the situation with detainees, hundreds of whom appear destined to remain imprisoned for perhaps years into the forseeable future without even the pretense of a trial.

It would be nice to hear some acknowledgement that this failure was predictable. But I don't want to gloat; I want to see lives saved, both Iraqui and American. This just can't be achieved by inflicting futher terrorism on a country that didn't, and wasn't capable of, attacking us.

My son is about to turn 11 years old; he'll be old enough to serve in the military in 7 years. My daughter, in just over 17 years. Will we still have troops in Iraq then? Will we have an economy in shape to provide them with any other prospects for employment? Will they be drafted?

Without leaders who are willing to acknowledge mistakes and change course, it doesn't look promising.

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Fri, 18 Mar 2005 The Thrice-Cursed Airport Express

The thrice-cursed Airport Express has crashed again. First, printer sharing failed, and then a few days later the shared internet connection failed. Running the Airport Admin utility revealed that the device couldn't even be found on the network. A power cycle fixed it.

I checked Apple's site and there is an update to the firmware, which will take the device from 6.1 to 6.1.1; we'll see if that offers any improvement. The AirPort 4.1 software package offered for download on the same page is apparently the same version I already have. Meanwhile, until I determine if this update helps the reliability, I can't recommend the AirPort Express to anyone.

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Sat, 12 Mar 2005 Baby Drinks

So, we had eaten dinner, and were having some hot chocolate: Isaac, Grace, and I were drinking it out of mugs.

Baby Vera started yelling (not crying or screaming, just kind of... yelling, and waving her arms to get our attention, basically saying "Hey! Hey! I want some too!")

She would not calm down until we gave her something to drink (a small amount of water) in a cup with a handle like ours. She neede a little assistance with the fine adjustments, but had the basic movements right, and managed to drink some water out of a real cup, holding it (mostly) herself, and then she appeared to be satisfied and stopped yelling.

She was born October 29th. That puts her age at... hmm... exactly 9 weeks from her date of birth to the last day of December 2004, plus 10 weeks to the day to reach 11 March 2005, for 19 weeks, or if you measure by irregular calendar months, a couple of days shy of 4 1/2 months.

She is nearly crawling, too. We've got to start getting the house baby-proofed!

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Dobson and Wonka

Baby Veronica is almost ten months old, and walking everywhere. She's getting ahead of our child-proofing again; she can now crawl over the barriers (pillows) we pile up to keep her from going up the stairs. This leaves us terrified that she is going to climb them, and fall down a whole flight of stairs; she is coordinated to get to the top, but not to get back down yet. Maybe the pile of pillows at the bottom would keep her from breaking her neck, but I don't think we can count on that. The arrangement of wall and railing in our apartment will not accommodate any baby gate we've been able to find, so we will have to come up with something else. Our ancient and badly-maintained apartment is hard to baby proof in other ways; for example, the downstairs bathroom door won't close all the way, so she can just push the door open to get in. We've been keeping the trash can in there, to keep it out of her reach, since she considers all manner of dirt and trash to make excellent toys. Also, she likes to visit people while they are sitting on the toilet!

I have a backlog of baby photos to put on the web site, and another roll of film will be ready to pick up as prints and a CD from Walgreen's tonight. Taking lots of photos guarantees that at least a few of them will be passable. So: more baby photos, as soon as I get a chance. I need a little quiet time on the computer, when baby Veronica is not trying to demolish and eat everything in the office. I've got some other things that have to get done first: some consulting work to finish, and some work to do in Quicken, to confirm just how fast our money is vanishing.

Grace completed her insurance class last week, and seems on track to take her exam this week. She is trying to review every day until the exam, so it stays fresh. It's a lot of obscure information to hold on to and regurgitate on cue, so we'll try and get her into the exam as soon as possible.

One complication is the van. It needed a new fuel pump, and we had it replace. We got one estimate, from a local shop we go to often, but it seemed ridiculously high, so we took it to a cut-rate place in Ypsilanti. Now the van is dripping gas and smells like gasoline. I think we should not even be driving it; I want them to tow it to their shop and fix it for free. I think they screwed up, big-time. This begs the question of whether we want a shop that screwed up so badly, creating a possible death-trap out of our van, should be entrusted to get it right a second time. I have to assume they will try to wriggle out of responsibility. And we can't keep throwing money at different shops; we already had to eat the cost of diagnosis at the first shop. Urgh.

I've found an interesting piece here:

http://www.family.org/docstudy/newsletters/a0021043.cfm

It is a newsletter from Dr. James Dobson (Focus on the Family), a conservative think tank. I bring it up because it is being quoted in the leftish media out of context; this is an interesting example of the left engaging in practices they disparage the right for so much: taking quotes out of context. It was published in the Nation, and is now being cited elsewhere, such as on Alternet:

http://alternet.org/story/24359/

Now, I may have my doubts about the overall thesis of the piece in question, which is that homosexuality can (or should) be "prevented" by early intervention in the lives of young boys or girls who show cross-dressing, or even artistic, tendencies. There's certainly a lot to unpack and seriously question in a thesis like that. A lot of Christians would disagree with Dobson's premises; even some of the crazier recognize that he is channeling some of Freud's more discredited ideas (Google for "dobson penis freud" if you're interested). I'm not going to take the whole thing on now. But the overall method Dobson describes is about how fathers need to be strong role models and engaged with their sons. This one somewhat bizarre is being quoted out of context -- and there is a lot of context -- is the following:

"He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger."

Um, indeed. But out of context, that does not seem like a good recipe for preventing young boys from indulging in narcissistic masturbatory fantasies. Or something. Actually, in my case, with Isaac, the first time he saw me naked in a pool shower, he was horrified, because he was never circumcised, and I had to tell him about how I was surgically mutilated as a baby, without benefit of anaesthetic... and how many other boys still are.

But be that as it may, the Nation's use of that line out of context reminds me of the reasons I stopped reading the magazine: basically, because of the tendencies of its authors to wallow in their own narcissistic masturbatory fantasies of what the right's ideas were all about, without actually unpacking and engaging their arguments, or even understanding them. It's kind of like believing that women go veiled in some Islamic societies because men hate them. There's a certain aspect of truth to that, but it doesn't begin to explain the history and cultural meaning of the veil. Lame.

Last night we went to see the new Willy Wonka movie at the IMAX theater at the Henry Ford Museum. It was better than I expected; some tepid reviews had left me with lowered expectations. That is probably a good thing. The IMAX format was a lot of fun for this film, especially during Oompa Loompa musical numbers. It isn't just a bigger picture, but filmed on much larger format film, so there is a very detailed grain to it that works especially well in this movie to reveal artificial-looking eyes (with contact lenses, in most cases, or digitally enhanced), and makeup (usually ghoulish). The wrinkled faces of Charlie Bucket's elderly grandparents are wonderfully expressive in this huge format. It's pretty much the ultimate Tim Burton film; he's gotten very, very good at what he does, and if you like Tim Burton films, you'll like this one. It is in some ways closer to the original text than the older movie, but gives Willy Wonka a back story and rationale. It isn't so true to the book, but I think it makes a better movie.

It's also made me give a little more thought to the Willy Wonka story. I find it interesting that the setting is a factory: a place which is inherently unsafe, because manufacturing requires energies and materials to come togther in large quantities, in which adult rules for safety must obtain, and in which the strategies of the various children (gluttony, begging and demanding, artificially inflated self-confidence, excessive smarts) and the parents that made the children that way can't protect them, probably for the first time in their lives, and so it is time for some hard life lessons.

It's really a Grimm's fairy tale, although everyone survives in the end, unlike the way things work in the original Brothers Grimm stories. Burton makes it even more complicated when he asks us to consider Willy Wonka's own family story and Wonka's own strategies are for confronting life's hardships. (Johnny Depp's Wonka comes off reminiscent of Michael Jackson). The film actually goes a little deeper in that respect. Charlie's character, however, and that of his grandfather are not explored deeply at all; in the book and original movie, Charlie's grandfather tempts him into his own naughty behavior (stealing "fizzy lifting drinks" and nearly getting themselves killed, and nearly losing the grand prize). In this film Charlie is flawlessly boring in his desire to give everything to his family; he even offers to sell his golden ticket to provide money for his parents. Fortunately, one of the grandparents tells him, in one of the film's best lines, that there are only ever going to be five golden tickets, but there will always be more money because "they print more every day." Sage advice to take a once-in-a-lifetime chance!

Sadly, upon questioning after the movie, Isaac was not able to come up with a single way in which this IMAX film was different than the usual films we go to. (The last film we went to was perhaps seven to nine months ago, when we went to see The Incredibles). The fact that the screen was eighty feet high and a hundred and twenty feet wide, the seating angled steeply down, the aspect ratio different, the picture incredibly sharp and detailed, and the sound piped through a 12,000 watt surround sound system didn't seem to register at all. Sometimes we worry about that boy. I guess we won't be spending the extra travel time and money to go IMAX showings again, although Grace and I enjoyed it. I expected Veronica to be nervous and frightened, but she actually just seemed quite fascinated and content to watch, even when the sound got very loud, and fell asleep for the second half. I wonder what that means about her.

In other news, I will be interviewing at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsbugh. I had a previous phone interview with a group in the Robotics Lab. This position would involve taking over maintenance and enhancement for a large Common Lisp application. It is also DARPA-funded and done as a kind of subcontract to Northrop Grummann. There are some ethical issues, since it is a scheduling program that is used to schedule Air Force planes, apparently for supply, refueling, medical evacuation, and for bombing, too. I really, really want the opportunity to work on a project in Common Lisp, and we would all really like to get out of Ann Arbor. I'll have to think hard about it. There is another embedded programming possibility in Ann Arbor, and the possibility of continuing at Visteon. It will all come to a crisis point soon, but at least there are some possibilities opening up; that wasn't happening for me a year ago.

In the little bits of free time I've been able to scrounge, I am reading Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun novels. I have long been a fan of the Book of the New Sun; I've read it several times, and have the distinct feeling that there is a lot that I failed to understand. This feeling was only intensified by picking up Robert Borski's book Solary Labyrinth, which features some highly speculative interpretation on the family connections and meanings present in the book. Some I agree with, and some I think are long shots, based on only the most tenuous textual evidence. Borski's book made me feel that despite having read the books at least three times, I may as well have been reading a different book altgether. Better and more readable than Borski's book is Attending Daedelus, which features some more understandable interpretation, and a very useful chapter that summarizes the plot of the New Sun books. These somewhat obscure books are available on Amazon; there is a new book of Wolfe criticism coming out, which I have pre-ordered.

I tried to read the Long Sun books when they came out, but after getting halfway through Nightside the Long Sun, I decided not to bother. In comparison with the New Sun books, the Long Sun books are written in a much different style. They are a third-person narrative, and the story is extremely time-compressed; the whole 4-volume series takes place in about three calendar weeks. While the New Sun books give the immediate impression of complexity and depth and a great deal of back-story, the Long Sun books appear deceptively simple: less of the New Sun's space opera style and more like a simple fable or coming-of-age story. However, I now see that it was this radical change in style that turned me off, and gave me the mistaken impression that the Long Sun books lacked depth and characterization. In fact, they are incredibly evocative. Wolfe has just evolved as a writer, and he is able to pack much more into seemingly simple events. There is a great deal of foreshadowing, both in "reality" and in carefully portrayed hallucinations and dream states, and careful use of particularly evocative words. Together these hint at the underlying story. The main character, Patera Silk, is a much more sympathetic character than Severain the Torturer and Autarch of Urth, but there is a lot more to him than first appears. Gene Wolfe is particularly fond of unreliable narrators, and since Silk doesn't fully understand all the things happening around him, at least not at first, it is up to us to find the "true" story. In Silk's world, magic is indistinguishable from technology, to paraphrase Clarke's Law. His world is truly not as it seems. In fact, these books are so complex beneath the surface that after finishing the second, I had to debate with myself about whether I should continue to the third or immediately re-read the second, just to try to understand more of what I had just finished reading!

I have also purchased the Short Sun trilogy, in preparation. I don't get much time to read these days, and even when I do, I am often distracted, so it may be a while, but I want to get to the end!

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Wed, 09 Mar 2005 In the Bunker

I recently heard an interview in which an administration insider described a political leader as follows:

That's an area where Hitler did a huge amount of harm: he actually tried to manipulate the consciences of the German people. He convinced them they had a task to do, they had to exterminate the Jews, because the Jews caused all our problems. It wasn't Hitler's own idea... it had been put forward much earlier... that they had to make a sacrifice.

And I can remember a writer... she interviewed a soldier who had been stationed in a concentration camp. He was a guard, and she asked him: Didn't you feel any pity at all... for the people you treated so badly there?

And he replied "yes, I did feel pity, but I had to overcome it. That was a sacrifice I had to make for the greater cause." And that's what happend to conscience.

After all, Hitler used to always say "You don't have to worry, any of you... you just have to do whatever I say, and I'll take responsibility." As if anyone can take charge of another person's conscience. I do think you can make someone's conscience more sensitive, or desensitize it, or manipulate it.

The longer I live, the older I get, the more I feel this burden, this feeling of guilt, because I worked for a man, and I actually like him, but he caused such terrible suffering... and the feeling that I was so unaware and so thoughtless... that I didn't notice or pay attention. That feeling has oppressed me more and more.

It seems to me that I should be angry with the child I was, that juvenile young girl, or that I can't forgive her for failing to recognize in time what horrors that monster caused. The fact that I didn't see what I was getting involved in, and above all that I just said "yes" without thinking at all... I find it hard to forgive myself for everything.

He was a crimintal -- it's just that I didn't realize it. At some point afterwards, I began to wonder if I should have seen that... and after all, apart from me there were millions who didn't see that. I mean, it's not as though everyone apart from me realized what a criminal he was. And I try to take heart from those thoughts.

And Hitler did somehow embody something monumental. At first, when I was a child, the first time I met him he probably had a kind of paternal protective attitude towards me... and that's something I had longed for. I used to envy children who could say things like "My father says so and so," or "My father thinks..." I used to think having a father must be very important. Then I started working for Hitler, and suddenly I had that sense of security, too. There really was a sense of security in that community, which cut itself off so much from the outside... I think I had a very subservient attitude toward him as a father figure.

You know, I never had the feeling that he was conscious of pursuing criminal aims. For him they were ideals. For him they were great goals. And human life meant nothing to him in comparison. But that only became so apparent to me afterwards. You see, in the inner circle surrounding him, in his private sphere, I was shielded from the megalomaniacal projects and the barbaric measures. That was the awful thing, and that's what gave me such a shock later, when I realized what had been happening. When I started working there, I thought I was at the source of information and in fact, I was in a blind spot. It's like in an explosion, there's one place where calmness reigns. And that was the great illusion, the great, not disappointment, but lie that I had made myself believe.

The word Jew was virtually never used in everyday speech. The fact that Hitler would, at times, say something in his speeches about "international Judaism" or "the Jews," that was virtually ignored. Nobody ever raised the subject. At least, not in our presence. Actually, the only time I can remember the subject really being an issue was one evening at the Berghof when Frau von Schirach was a guest. I wasn't there at the time, I only heard about it. I was out of the room when it happened. She was on fairly cordial terms with Hitler, and she suddenly raised the subject. She told the Fuhrer directly that it was quite terrible, the way the Jews were treated in Amsterdam. They were packed into trains, she said, and it was an inhuman way to behave. It must have made him very angry, and he said to her: "Don't interfere in things you don't understand. This mawkishness and sentimentality." He really was very annoyed. He walked right out of the room and didn't return. And Frau Schirach was never invited to the Berghof again.

You couldn't discuss anything with him that was somehow sensitive or difficult. It was one aspect of him. And that was really the only time a conflict situation developed.

He didn't think in human dimensions. Humanity was never of any importance to him. It was always the concept of the superman, the nation, always this abstract image of a vast German Reich, powerful and strong. But the individual never mattered to him.

As for myself, deep in my heart, I did have some doubts, and I wondered: "Is all this absolutely right?" But then to question the situation, actually to initiate a discussion, would have taken more courage. And I think it's also the case that if you value and respect someone, you don't really want to destroy the image of that person -- you don't want to know, in fact, if disaster lies behind the facade.

I don't think he considered war a light-hearted matter. He regarded it as a terrible thing, although he never said so. For instance, whenever there were reports of air raids and people described the situation, or if I said something like: "My Fuhrer, you can't imagine how miserable it is for all those homeless people whose houses have been bombed -- it's just so terrible." He'd stop me right away and say: "I know exactly how it is, but we shall strike back. We shall take revenge, and with our new weapons everything will change. Vengeance will be ours!" He would always say that, and in particular he'd say that we would rebuild everything after the war and make it better than ever.

I think there was a general policy of denial. He never did see a city that had been badly bombed. We traveled through Germany in the special train with the blinds down, and when he reached Anhalter Station in Berlin at night the chauffeur would take the streets that weren't so badly damaged.

In the early days after the war, the past wasn't an issue, strangely enough. It wasn't a subject to be discussed in public either. And there weren't any books about it. In politics there wasn't yet the process of coming to terms with the past. Not even the Nuremberg trials started that process, the way it happened later, in the '60s. I don't know exactly why, but suddenly there were so many books. And lots of voices were raised. We heard about the SS state and then the diary of Anne Frank and there were people who had survived the whole thing. People who had resisted also spoke out. The thing that made a very strong impression on me was that after the war, the world wasn't at all the way Hitler had portrayed it and predicted it would be. Suddenly there was a spirit of freedom and especially the Americans -- I didn't get home until a year after the occuption, but especially the Americans -- turned out to be very good democrats and very helpful people. The care parcels started coming. I suddenly realized that none of it was true.

So in the early years it didn't really occur to me to come to terms with my past. Naturally all the horrors that emerged in the Nuremberg trials about the six million Jews and people of other faiths and beliefs who lost their lives -- all that struck me as very shocking. But I wasn't able at first to see the connection with my own past. I still felt somehow content that I had no personal guilt and had known nothing about it. I had no idea of the extent of what happened. But then one day I was walking past the memorial in Franz Josef Street to Sophie Scholl, a young girl who opposed Hitler, and I realized that she was the same age as me and that she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. At that moment I really sensed that it is no excuse to be young, and that it might have been possible to find out what was going on.

The film is "Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary." The directors include a commentary that describes Traudl Junge's later life, including the fact that she took an early retirement due to severe depression, and spent years volunteering as a reader for the blind. Shortly before the film opened, she told one of the directors "I think I'm starting to forgive myself." She died of cancer on the day of the film's premiere.

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Sun, 06 Mar 2005 Star Trek, Bismuth Crystals, and Baby Fatigue

So, we received in the mail a really cool bismuth crystal from an eBay seller. It gives our dining table a wonderful Star Trek feel. To find them, check out the seller's eBay store, Bismuth Crystals Unlimited:

http://stores.ebay.com/BISMUTH-CRYSTALS-UNLIMITED_W0QQssPageNameZl2QQtZkm

Ours is a 225-gram crystal, which was the second-biggest one that he had available. These things are fascinating. They are "natural" in the sense that they grow without prompting, in very pure molten bismuth cooled slowly, with the remaining molten metal poured off to expose the crystal, but "unnatural" in the sense that the conditions that make these very large, beautifully-colored crystals would probably never occur in a natural setting. (I say "probably" because it is a big planet and a big universe! Who knows? There might be an planet-sized, chemically- and isotopically-pure crystal floating out there, produced in some incomprehensible stellar process...)

We've been watching episodes from the Star Trek (original series) first season DVD set. Most of them have been quite the fun blast from the past, especially "City on the Edge of Forever," "Balance of Terror," and "The Corbomite Maneuver." "Balance of Terror" features some very fine acting, even if the writers can't keep track of the difference between phasers and photon torpedoes. Kirk's reputation as a total ham is not truly justified. But last night we stumbled across "The Alternative Factor," which none of us had any memory of ever seeing before.

We quickly found out just why we could not remember it; even our friend Olivia, who was a seriously dedicated Star Trek fan: it is terrible! The episode features nauseous spinning-screen effects, photographic-negative effects to indicate an alternate universe, and even contains the immortal line of dialogue "Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!"

There is the germ of an interesting alternate-universe story in there somewhere, but the storytelling is just awful: everything is told, instead of shown, in long and confusing talky scenes in which the techno-babble phrases like "negative magnetic corridor" pile up thick and fast. The storyline constantly contradicts and muddles itself (initially we are told Lazarus is traveling in time, but this seems to be an unnecessary complication; we're told that the planet is "dead" and "destroyed" but in fact it looks a lot like Southern California; there are repeated references to alien invasion and end-of-the-universe scenarios, and we are tortured by constant repetition of a painful music cue and cheesy "universe-flipping" effect. At the end, Kirk learns the truth, alone, but suddenly Spock and everyone else seems to have been informed as well, without ever being told. It is just terribly sloppy. Dilithium crystals don't look anything like the dilithium crystals shown in other episodes. One half of the two-sided hero/villain is identifiable mainly by his exceptionally cheesy facial hair. They definitely weren't all masterpieces!

As an exercise, maybe Grace and I will take a shot at rewriting "The Alternative Factor." She has some experience in screen-writing, and I have some experience in writing short stories, so maybe we can come up with something better. It could be fun; it could even play into an interesting home-school exercise for Isaac.

A baby update: Veronica is just past the four-month mark. She can't quite sit up on her own, but she will happily lie on her belly or back and play with toys. Yesterday she ate a Sears tool catalog. (Well, not really, but she ripped a bunch of the pages out and tried to stuff them in her mouth). She has discovered her toes. She's very stong, and seems to really enjoy working out: wrestling, doing sit-ups and push ups -- basically, anything that gives her a chance to work her baby muscles hard makes her giggle and laugh her head off. She will be crawling very soon!

And me? Although she really is a great baby, and sleeps most of the way through the night, she wants a lot of attention, and we do our best to give it to her. The end result is that I am generally always just a little bit more tired and distracted than it seems like I should be. When she does get to sleep, and I'd like to stay up and study or write, I usually just crash instead. Having a baby at 37 is probably quite a bit harder, in terms of stamina.

Grace certainly has it worse: she is Vera's caregiver all day, every weekday. She has been really great about trying to give me a little bit of time to myself on some evenings and weekends, but she is definitely tired too. A long winter with multiple bouts of colds and flu has not helped any, either! With any luck as the days get longer and warmer we'll get some energy back.

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Mon, 28 Feb 2005 Bismuth

So, we received our bismuth metal and proceeded to do some informal experiments. I call them "informal" because we did not keep strict records, form a precise hypothesis, and work hard to vary only one variable at a time. However, we did form some interesting conclusions and observations.

Experiment 1: Diamagnetism

The first thing we tried to observe was the diamagnetic effect in bismuth. The idea behind "diamagnetism" is that a magnet will induce in some materials an opposing magnetic field. We tried to observe this using a set of small but very powerful neodymium magnets. I am sorry to say that we were unable to observe any noticeable magnetic repulsion using any amount of bismuth from tiny splatter fragments to a solid ingot of perhaps 200g in mass. I am not sure why we could not observe this effect, which is supposed to be quite strong. One hypothesis is that our bismuth was not pure bismuth, but I think this is very unlikely since in all other respects (melting temperature, formation of crystals, oxidation, color tint of the oxidizing melt, and behavior when the liquid metal was dripped into water) it behaved exactly as expected). Also, it is my understanding that the bismuth would not need to be absolutely pure to show the diamagnetic effect. We will have to do a little more reading and perhaps ask some other people.

Safety

For the hot metal experiments, we made sure that we were wearing reasonably durable clothes that covered most of our skin, that we both had eye protection, and that we had a ready supply of water nearby to put out any fires, including a 32-ounce cup pre-filled and ready to go. For eye protection, I have prescription polycarbonate lenses which I judged to be adequate. Isaac put on a pair of polycarbonate sunglasses when he came near the melted metal. We used a thick cloth potholder to grab the handles of the cups, which was adequate, since the metal handles acted as heat-sinks anyway, although a silicone glove might have been provided a better grip.

Experiment 2: Melting

The second informal experiment was done to answer the question "can we melt bismuth on our stovetop?"

Our stove is a rather low-end home stove, and the oven is not very powerful, frequently doing a poor job getting the right amount of heat for baking, so I was not completely confident that we'd be able to get the metal hot enough.

Our methodology was to place 5 10-gram cylinders of the metal, as it arrived from the supplier, into a new stainless steel 3/4-cup measure. We placed this directly on the heating element and set the temperature control to 75% of the way to maximum. I was prepared to wait a while for melting to start, but Isaac noticed that the metal began melting almost immediately. So the answer was "yes." It did not even seem necessary to set the heat to maximum.

Experiment 3: Crystals

The third informal experiment was done to answer the question "can we form macroscopic bismuth crystals?"

The methodology was to melt 100 grams of bismuth and then remove the cup from the heat, allowing it to cool for several minutes without disturbing it, then pouring off the remaining melted metal into another heated cup.

We ran into complications because I had thought that we could place the hot cup on a heavy wood cutting-board in order to to allow it to cool slowly, rather than on a more heat-conductiven metal surface. The heat was too much for the wood, though, and the cutting board smoked and steamed underneath the cup. We increased the ventilation, but this was not really satisfactory. The smoke detectors did not go off, but it was at this point that Grace took the baby from the living room downstairs with her to the laundry room so that the smoke would not irritate her.

Despite this complication, after the first pour-off, we noticed visible crystals. After the bismuth and cup had cooled for several minutes, it was cool enough to try scraping some of the tiny crystals out of the cup, which I did using a wire hanger.

We broke one small crystal, about 3 millimeters across, that exhibited "hopper" structure. This was not very impressive, but it proved the concept. I threw this one back in the melted metal in the hopes of getting larger crystals on another pass. In retrospect, I should have saved it, for we were not able to get good crystal specimens after this.

The plan was to try using different cooling times to determine the cooling time which produced the most crystals. Because I was trying to find a solution to the smoke problem, we were not able to repeat the experimental conditions accurately while changing only one variable. I tried using ten layers of aluminum foil between the steel cup and the wooden board, reasoning that the foil would deflect some of the heat. This did not really solve the scorching problem; it just scorched more slowly. Moreover, the use of the foil dramatically changed the characteristics of the cooling metal. It no longer cooled first from the sides and bottom, but seemed to cool from both the top and bottom equally, so that when we attempted to pour off the remaining melted metal, it poured not from the top but from "holes" in what had become a semi-crystalline slab of brittle, oxidized bismuth. This brittle mass was clearly formed of a crystallized form of the metal, but it did not form attractive individual crystals.

I should say a few words about oxidation. We observed as we poured off, melted, and re-poured off the metal, it developed a "sheen" of various colors, most notably a vivid blue and green, as well as an oxidized, ugly "skin" of powder-gray metal, which would not melt. We were able to skim this off using the wire hanger and collect a heap of powdery oxidized bismuth. After working with the metal for a while, the cups became scarred and pocked with a yellowish oxide on the bottom, and lumps of scaly oxide on the sides, which we were unable to scrape off using the wire. At higher temperatures the liquid metal could be skimmed with the hanger, which would leave behind a clean, shiny surface, which would then immediately begin to develop a powdery-gray appearance.

This bismuth oxide, which we were not able to melt, could presumably be "reduced" using charcoal and a crucible, but we did not have an apparatus to do this, and so our shiny melted bismuth became gradually more and more contaminated with oxide. The smoke from the scorching cutting board, and possible varnish on the wire hanger, may have contributed to this contamination.

So, result was that we were able to grow at least a few small macroscopic crystals, but we were not able to successfully experiment with melting and cooling conditions or improve the results. I was not terribly disappointed by this as I was not really expecting to be able to grow large, beautiful crystals with this simple setup.

Experiment 4: Casting

A fourth informal experiment was done to answer the question "Can we cast the molten bismuth into a solid ingot using a mold made from folded aluminum foil?"

This part was very interesting. The answer was technically "yes," although with extreme reservations.

I folded a dozen layers of foil into a small box shape, and placed it on the cutting board, and poured about 100 grams of molten bismuth into the mold.

The result was somewhat startling. The combination of hot bismuth and aluminum foil immediately produced a thick black smoke, so we cleared the area and increased the ventilation. The smoke was not coming from the wood underneath, which did scorch as expected, but seemed to come the mold itself. The foil did not visibly burn, but may have either burned under the molten bismuth or have somehow allowed the bismuth itself to oxidize with some violence.

The molten bismuth did form a solid ingot, which upon cooling we were able to remove from the foil, which did not appear particularly burned. The top of the ingot was coated with a black powdery residue, which was much more difficult to remove from my fingers than the bismuth oxide. We washed and dried the ingot. Some of the aluminum foil on the bottom had stuck to the metal and could not easily be removed. We decided to melt the ingot back down and remove the foil from the melt. However, once it was melted, we were not able to find the foil, so I assume that it burned up. Our melt was now presumably contaminated with aluminum oxide, which probably would have ruled out any further crystal growth.

So, in conclusion, it was possible to use foil to form a mold and create an ingot, but the heat produced a potentially dangerous reaction, so I would not want to try this again. Powdered aluminum is used as an explosive, and aluminum is apparently too prone to oxidation to use safely for such a purpose, although I imagine that a solid piece would not produce smoke so readily. We are not certain of the toxicity of the generated smoke, but presumably it was not a good idea to be breathing it. I was glad that the baby was out of the room and that we had good ventilation.

Experiment 5: Spatters

A fifth informal experiment was done to answer the question "what happens when you drop the molten bismuth metal into water?"

We tried using several different size containers and dropping the metal in different ways, ranging from pouring individual drops into the water up close, to pouring a stream from high up.

For these experiments we used a small steel bowl on the counter, and also a large bucket on the floor. This part made it clear how important it was to have eye protection. The hot metal produced small steam explosions, which resulted in sprays of water droplets as well as occasionally very small droplets of molten or near-molten bismuth. The result was somewhat like the spatters that can happen while cooking bacon in a frying pan. I received some very minor burns on my forearms, but I had expected that this might happen, and none of the burns were severe enough to require treatment.

Pouring pure bismuth into a small container in a steady stream produced very elaborate spatter shapes that would stick together in a semi-solid "forest." Doing this raised the temperature of the water to the point where it was steaming, and produced a lot of spatter.

Dropping bismuth into the larger bucket produced at least four somewhat distinct results.

Dropping the metal from several feet produced "exploded" shapes, where it appeared that the molten metal actually splashed upon hitting the water. The shapes ranged from very thin foil-like fragments to spheres and teardrops that seemed "exploded" -- hollowed out.

Pouring the bismuth very close to the water surface resulted in elongated, needle-like shapes with points at both ends, some several inches long.

Pouring the bismuth carefully drop-by-drop resulted in a large number of small, nearly identical "teardrop" shapes. These were so remarkably uniform and attractive that I separated these out and set them aside to put in a jar for display.

In the bottom of the bucket we also collected a very fine "sand" or "grit" of dark, oxidized-looking bismuth. It is not clear whether this was solid oxide, or how it was formed. Some hypotheses include: it oxidized by the dissolved oxygen in the water itself; the hot metal actually released oxygen from the water; it was produced by the explosion within the steam bubbles; it was somehow separated from the actual bismuth metal by the dropping process.

We collected up some of the less attractive pieces, dried them, and put them back to melt again. We discovered that it was extremely important to dry the bismuth thoroughly. Some of the hollowed-out shapes still contained enough water to cause a more violent steam explosion, which blew tiny molten metal droplets everywhere. This served as a good warning; if we try to melt down more of the spatter we will bake it at a low temperature first to drive off the water and then heat it gradually to melt it to avoid this violent steam release.

Experiment 6: Casting (again)

As a final experiment, we poured some of the remaining oxidized and unattractive melted bismuth into a cup and allowed it to cool to room temperature, in another attempt to make an ingot or slab for examination later. When it was cool I was able to remove it from the cup by knocking the cup hard against the wooden cutting board.

End Products

The experiments left us with several end-products:

A highly oxidized, ugly, irregular disc of bismuth combined with whatever oxides or other contaminants are present, with a powdery crust, partially yellow on the outside. I broke this into several pieces and put it into a bag. The broken edges exhibit a very shiny silicon-like appearance. The slab is extremely brittle.
A badly scorched wooden cutting board. I'll save this for now in case weneed to use it again, but we will probably discard it eventually because it smells very smokey.
Several "roasted" steel measuring cups. These are discolored on the outside from the heat. I scrubbed most of the oxide out with steel wool, but some remains that is too hard for me to remove. We will save these for possible use in melting down some of the spatter, or making more spatter, but they may be too contaminated to grow crystals.
One more clean unused steel measuring cup. We may use this for a future attempt to grow crystals.
Perhaps 300 or 400 grams of unused bismuth. We'll save this for a future experiment.
Several baggies with different kinds of spatter: one with very attractive teardrop shapes, which I would like to save; one with "exploded" shapes, one with "needle" shapes, and one that is a jumble of all the rest, most of which is in the form extremely small irregular foils, lumps, crumbs, particles, and fragments.

Paul's Conclusions:

This was a fun way to get the urge out of my system to play with molten metal. Although it was more a demonstration than a formal experiment, we did learn some interesting things and it brought up some open questions for further, more formal, experimentation.

I did wind up making a couple of blunders that caused safety risks. The biggest of these were super-heating the aluminum foil, and putting spatter products that were still damp back into the melt. Fortunatley these do not seem to have caused any long-term harm, although I regret the exposure to the smoke generated by the combination of the hot bismuth and aluminum foil. The scorching of the cutting board was unfortunate but I don't believe it represented a serious risk of fire, because the wooden board was too large and flat to ignite.

Questions for Isaac:

Read the chapter on bismuth in the Elmsley element book.
Examine the contents of the various baggies, particularly the broken "ingot" or solid disc, and the long "needle" shapes. (Wash your hands with soap and water after handling this oxide, since it will stick to your hands).
We can describe metals as ductile (bendable) or brittle (breakable). How would you describe the needle shapes? How would you describe the ingot?
Can you explain the difference in color between the somewhat shiny teardrop shapes and the grayish surface of the ingot? How about the shiny broken edges of the ingot?
Are the needle shapes crystallized metal? Explain. Why or why not?
Is the ingot crystallized metal? Explain. If so, is it one crystal or many crystals? Can you see the crystals? Why or why not?
Explain how to convert the melting temperature of bismuth from Celsius to Fahrenheit.
What would you do differently if you had a chance to do more experiments with bismuth? Particularly, address how to improve safety, how to cool the molten metal without using the wooden board. Which experiment would you like to do?
For the experiment you would like to do, write down the hypothesis, the planned method, the expected result, the reason the expected result would confirm the hypothesis, and an alternative explanation for the expected result that does not confirm the hypothesis.

Isaac's Conclusions:

(to be done!)

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Tue, 22 Feb 2005 Slogging Along with Turin

So, I'm working my way through the second book of Lost Tales. The early versions of Beren and Luthien were easy to read, especially with the somewhat comic scenes with the cat-lord, Tevildo. The draft of the story of Turin Turambar, entitled "Turambar and the Foaloke," is not so easy. It is long, and grim, largely in a very formal style, and it veers perilously close to reading like "the telephone book in Elvish." This is in part because so many of the names are different in the version of the story with which I am most familiar.

I'll have to fortify myself by listening to my recorded version of the tale of Turin Turambar as it appears in the Silmarillion. If that doesn't get me through it, I'll set it aside for now and move on to the next story. Maybe I'm just tired today.

In our bedtime storytelling we're in the midst of the Council of Elrond, the point at which fellowship is formed and the story really gets moving. The night before last we were in the hall of fire, and I read out loud Bilbo's poem about Earendil. I had long thought this was one of the more abstract and dull of the poems in the book, but now that I am older, when I read the poem out loud I find it stunning: an amazing vocabulary, great subtlety of wording, with alliteration and internal half-rhymes, makes it perhaps the best single poem in the book, in my haughty and egomaniacal opinion.

Shortly I'll have the chance to read Tolkien's early Tale of Earendel (an earlier spelling), which contains several earlier poems. I'm very much looking forward to it. It makes me laugh even more at Bilbo's cheekiness in reciting a poem about Earendil in the house of Elrond. But it is a remarkable poem, and the elves were not mocking Bilbo when they asked him to recite it again. It also makes me wonder what it would be like to be old enough to remember personally a world that is now only myth -- but since I was born in the 1960s, perhaps I do -- and wonder further what it would be like to have a constellation for a father!

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Mon, 21 Feb 2005 Lisp Group

I'm looking for people interested in meeting to talk about Lisp, Scheme, and other languages of that ilk. I have set up a meetup.com group, the Ann Arbor Lisp Languages Meetup; the group home page is here:

http://lisp.meetup.com/54/

As of yet, we have not met, because no one has joined the goup. I'm posting this here in part so that anyone Googling for an Ann Arbor, Michigan, Lisp User's Group, or Scheme User's Group, will find it.

I would also like to get this topic syndicated via RSS onto the Planet Lisp aggregate site (planet.lisp.org), but as of yet the Lisp content is a little light, so I wait until there is a little bit more of interest here before asking them to syndicate my feed. The RSS feed for this topic is available as:

http://thepottshouse.org/blosxom.cgi/root/geeky/programming/lispish.rss

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Cesium

So, I decided to order a couple of pounds of pure bismuth to melt down with my son, in order to attempt to create bismuth crystals. In case we can't get any visible crystals, I also bid on a really pretty specimen on eBay. We might also see whether crystallization can be improved by using a "seed" crystal. I don't know whether that works with metals or not.

I mentioned cesium as being another metal that would melt in your hand. Well, some web sites describe a couple of other metal elements as being liquid at "room temperature," but really it depends on the temperature of your room. Cesium melts at about 83 degrees Fahrenheit, gallium at 86, and rubidium at 102.

It is a bit odd to talk about the "melting point of francium," since it is an unstable radioactive element that would be insanely difficult or insanely dangerous to accumulate in a quantity large enough to be visible, but the melting point of francium, presumably calculated via mathematical modeling rather than by observation, is listed in the books as 27 degrees Celsius (about 81 degrees Fahrenheit). Bromine and mercury are both liquid at what I think of as comfortable "room temperature" -- around 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

So, this is technically true -- cesium will melt in your hand, but I should probably also point out that when it was done melting in your hand, it would then melt your hand, or, rather, burn its way through it in an extremely painful way. Cesium is extremely hazardous, and pure cesium must be kept under glass in argon. A cesium FAQ list at the University of Rochester says:

"Cesium is an alkali metal, in the same group as lithium, sodium, potassium, and rubidium, and is similarly reactive, but to a much higher degree due to its extreme electropositivity. It reacts explosively with water, and with ice down to -116 C. In air, it catches fire spontaneously and burns with a brilliant sky-blue flame...

Its hydroxide is the most powerful aqueous base known, and will eat through glass, flesh, bone, and numerous other substances."

Wow.

The FAQ is here:

http://www.cs.rochester.edu/users/faculty/nelson/cesium/cesium_faq.html

This is too bad, because it is very pretty; if mercury is quicksilver, cesium could be called quickgold. It would be a beautiful specimen to have in an element collection, but it is far too dangerous to have a specimen, even a nicely ampouled specimen, in the house with small children (or even with me; I would no doubt want to handle it all the time too). Oh, well.

Of possibly more interest are the non-toxic metals with low melting points. More on those when we get our bismuth!

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Mercury

So, I should mention that I have a jar of elemental mercury. I have not weighed it, but I would guess that it contains two or three pounds. It is currently in zip-lock bag, in a tin, padded with foam rubber, on a shelf. It came from my stepfather's basement; I think he probably picked it up from a General Electric salvage lot in the 1970s. He used to bring home all kinds of interesting electronic and mechanical stuff. It was apparently not widely known then that mercury was toxic.

There are a couple of things we could do with this. We could pay someone to dispose of it for us -- probably the safest option. We could donate it to someone setting up an element display. We could just keep it as-is and put off making any decision as to its disposition. Or, we could have it ampouled in some way to make it display-worthy for our own element collection, and keep it locked up until the kids are old enough to be trusted around it.

It is somewhat oxidized and not shiny; this can be remedied by squeezing it through cheesecloth or a coffee filter. But although I used to handle this stuff as a kid, and did the filtering procedure before, I am reluctant to do it in our apartment, especially not with a child and a baby on premises. And then I'd have a cheesecloth or coffee filter contaminated with mercury.

What I'd really like is to find someone who would filter it (to "polish it up") and then put it in a heavy walled and attractive display bottle, top the jar off with argon, and seal it up. This is presumably a dangerous procedure; I don't even know how this kind of thing is safely done, but it must be done often, at least with smaller quantities, because ampoules like this are included in commercially available element displays.

Presumably, you'd need a vapor hood, and would do it wearing protective gear.

If you know someone who would like to take on a project like this, and who would be willing to accept the risk of a mercury spill, get in touch. It would be especially great to find someone who would do it in exchange for splitting the mercury into two jars, keeping half for his or her own element display.

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Fri, 18 Feb 2005 History Volumes 2 and 6

I have finished reading the early versions of the story of Beren and Luthien, in volume 2 of the History of Middle Earth. This draft is interesting in part, as I have said, because of Huan's nemesis, the evil cat Tevildo, and because Beren is apparently also an elf, but one of a different social class and community. The great love between elf and mortal man apparently had not become part of Tolkien's mythology yet.

The Tevildo material is interesting -- it seems that Tolkien may have been a dog person. One of the cats is actually killed and skinned. Tevildo's lieutenants act like cats, making enormous leaps and twitching their tales. Some of the story borders on comic fable. It is hard to decide whether Tolkien included the comic element wtih full deliberation, or whether he found himself distracted by writing an "origin" fable of the antipathy between cats and dogs in the midst of telling the story of Beren and Luthien. I tend to think the latter is true.

Intentionally, or not. I think he may have eliminated the entire Lord of Cats component of the storyline because it generated that comic feel, and in the later versions of the Silmarillion, he wanted to maintain that high mythological air. This is, I feel, a slight loss. Tolkien famously hated allegory, but the story of Tevildo is not allegory but fable, and I think Tolkien enjoyed writing fable. He may have come to feel that the form was unworthy; if so, that's a shame. I feel that a truly integrated Silmarillion, with "lost tales" framework story intact, could have subsumed both the mythological style and the fable style, though broken down by complete story, perhaps; the combination of styles within the story of Beren and Luthien perhaps did not serve that story well. The storytellers are actually different characters, so it would make perfect sense that they would tell the tales with very different voices.

I received the last two outstanding orders from Amazon: volumes 6 and 8 of the History. Volume 6 was apparently the hardest for Amazon to get, but get it they did. Although all the rest were in mint condition, this one looks a bit shopworn -- not abused, but the cover is scuffed. The binding on this one is a bit distorted, but that is a manufacturing issue and hardly Amazon's fault. Still, it makes me wonder what various and sundry means they use to procure their books -- this volume looks like it came off the shelf of a retail store.

There also was no discount on this volume. Sadly, they also have raised the price of all the available volumes slightly now, although most of them are still far below list.

Anyway. I began reading Return of the Shadow last night. There are a couple of remarkable things about Tolkien's drafts. The first is that many of the ideas and phrases really did spring full-blown from J. R. R. Tolkien's mind in the first draft. Sometimes they are the most clever and recognizable bits, such as when Bilbo tells his assembled guests "I don't know half of you half as well as I would like, and less than half of you half as well as you deserve." Indeed, the whole structure of the party, the speech, and Bilbo's disappearance did not change much.

The second remarkable thing is that Tolkien had no outline. The party was a set piece that he put down on the page, but there was as of yet no vision behind it. In several of the succeeding drafts he tried to get up some momentum for the story, but wound up repeatedly writing himself into a corner. Bilbo goes off and gets married and lives happily ever after. No, that pretty much derails the story before it gets off the ground. Bilbo goes off to Rivendell and lives happily ever after. Same problem. Hmmm. Maybe it isn't Bilbo who gives the speech -- Bilbo is a little too fat and happy to be the protagonist at this point -- but Bingo, his son. Or maybe Bingo isn't his son, but his second cousin. How old is Bilbo, anyway? How many years have gone by? Is this his party, or Bingo's party?

At this point Tolkien had only some very sketchy ideas about where to take the story. There was no deep history behind the ring. He had some vague ideas about Bilbo wanting to go acquire himself some more dragon-gold, or see a live dragon again, or travel across the sea, as part of the ring's curse, but it was not connected to his more ancient and rich mythology. He wanted to re-create the success of the Hobbit, and satisfy his fans, but he also didn't have a lot of interest in telling another children's story. His heart lay in his "Lost Tales," the over-arching legendarium of Middle Earth. The Hobbit was not really connected to this existing body of material at all. The challenge that Tolkien had before him, in order to get himself interested in the story, was to find a way to connect it to that deeper world.

It took him many chapters and many revisions before this began to happen; prior to this, he was mainly "writing his way into the story," as Tom Shippey described the process.

This is unintentionally a great encouragement to writers everywhere. Tolkien proved it: you don't have to know just what you are doing, before you start. If you are truly a writer, the process itself will generate the interesting ideas.

It also reveals the fault lines in The Lord of the Rings. Clearly, there was room for a progressive series of plot outlines in Tolkien's process. Ideally, a writer would use both techniques.

It is now much more clear why the early parts of the story feel so uneven. This long story, generated by repeated revisions and in fits and starts, also suffered, in some sense, from incomplete revision. The process of discovery of the plot is still visible. The seams show. The ringrwaiths, for example, in the early chapters, are not very terrifying, because Tolkien, like Frodo, didn't know what the ringwraiths were, and what terror they represented. And once he knew, he did not rework all the older scenes to fit the ringwraiths as they became later.

There are other places where the seams show. The Bombadil and Old Man Willow episodes, for example, really don't fit into the story arc. Tolkien included them because he had already imagined these characters in his comic rhymes, and thought it would be fun to give the hobbits something to do on their journey to Rivendell. He was right, and this recycling gives us an interesting and enigmatic episode in the story, but only because he was such a gifted writer. Lesser writers should take this as an encouragement that writing itself is the primary tool needed to generate ideas, but that a little planning can go a long way in producing a finished product with a more integrated and unified feel to it, especially if you are not a Tolkien yourself.

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The Elements

So, my latest eBay obsession is beautiful specimens of pure elements. There are some sellers that specialize in unusual collectible pieces such as spheres of pure zinc, cadmium, or highly polished silicon, ingots or cylinders of aluminum or tungsten, and balls or lumps of some of the more expensive metals like osmium and iridium, which are neck-and-neck for the honor of densest readily available element, and which have to be melted in strange and very expensive contraptions such as electron-beam furnaces.

Beryllium and lithium are reactive, and iridium and osmium are very expensive, so my second thought was that it might be fun to have some less expensive specimens the represent radically different atomic weights, such as equal-sized pieces of zinc and tungsten. If I can't find equal-sized pieces, it would be cool to find similarly shaped pieces of the same mass, which would differ in size to a comical degree. I could also pick up an ingot if indium, which is an interesting, non-toxic metal that is extremely soft, and can be melted on a stovetop. I did not see any scandium, which is very expensive, or cesium or gallium, which will melt in your hand.

Tracking down a full set of attractive, pure specimens could very well be a full-time, and fascinating, hobby. A good place to start might be a set of attractive metals, like niobium and hafnium. But I probably should not try to take on yet another hobby, especially since I don't have a nice spot to set up a display of these speciments. Sigh.

Besides the pure element specimens, eBay also has great mineral specimens, such as beautiful black tourmaline and fluourite crystals, which would go, presumably, on a different shelf. There are also some amazing fabricated specimens, like a silver-doped bismuth crystal geode that looks like a robot egg, and a piece of Gadolinium Gallium garnet with crystals of platinum embedded in it.

I had a great collection of display-quality mineral specimens when I was young, but someone it got lost or thrown out while I was in college, when my parents moved. I've always regretted that: there were some beautiful specimens, like big cubes of pyrite and some very nice amethyst crystals, a s well as various granites and volcanic obsidian.

Theodore Gray's web site (theodoregray.com) has the fascinating details of his collection.

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Thu, 17 Feb 2005 Amazon Shines for Tolkien Scholars

So, I've now received the first five volumes of the History of Middle Earth in hardcover, purchased through Amazon. Two of the volumes were out of print, but were available as old/new stock (new books, but available through bookshops that specialize in remaindered or out-of-print books). I was able to process everything right through Amazon, just like I am able to buy from multiple used-book vendors via abebooks.com (which I also highly recommend). Apparently you can now buy used books via Amazon in a similar arrangement, but I have not tried it, preferring to support a smaller company in that case. The History of Middle Earth volumes, they are kind of in a gray area between used and new: they are regularly reprinted, but probably not in large quantities, and brick-and-mortar bookstores won't tend to stock them. The used copies available through abebooks.com tend to be very expensive first editions, or the limited collector's editions that cost hundreds of dollars. I don't particularly care which editions I get; I just wanted the whole set in hardcover, since the softcover editions are missing content. I have a feeling that most of the hardcover copies of the History volumes don't circulate a lot as used books; if someone actually took the trouble to track them down and buy them, they probably knew what they were getting, and wanted the books to be part of their permanent library.

Amazon provided a real advantage here: the list price of the History of Middle Earth is $30 per volume; on Amazon, I think I paid $17 each for most of them. The three volumes that came directly from Amazon came with free shipping. The ones that didn't were a bit more expensive and I had to pay for shipping, but the net result was still less than the $30 list price. Then, there is the matter of availability; most bookstores don't carry the History of Middle Earth volumes, or if they do, there will be one battered copy that has been thumbed by a lot of people but not purchased. I could have ordered them from a local bookstore, but they probably would have had the same issue as Amazon with the unavailability of certain volumes.

I've also received two of the next four books in the series, the ones that constitute the History of the Lord of the Rings. Amazon has required some extra lead time to track down copies of all four of these volumes. But they did, and although when you get free super saver shipping you usually have to wait for your order to be complete so that it is sent out in one package, in this case Amazon actually shipped the first two, when it looked like the rest were going to take a while, and then even sent the next two as separate orders one day apart, just to expedite matters. Someone (or perhaps even a rule in their computer system) was authorized to change the shipping arrangements to make sure I didn't have to wait longer than necessary for the part of my order that was ready. And they didn't charge me extra for shipping in multiple batches. That's a perfect example of why people come back to Amazon.

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The Nazgul (Ringwraiths) in the Book and on Film

So, I've been reading The Fellowship of the Ring to my family as a bedtime story, bit-by-bit, usually half a chapter at a time. I've read the books before, but reading it again after seeing both the theatrical and extended versions of the first film multiple times, and listening to the commentary of the writers and director, brings into focus some of the differences between book and film.

In the film, the assault at Weathertop is intense and violent. The wraiths are very solid, physical beings. They go up in flames in a very satisfying way. It is only in "wraithworld," when Frodo dons the ring, that they appear ghostly, and he can see their forms as once-great kings of men.

In the book, the sequence is somewhat different. The hobbits and strider are clustered around a blazing campfire. Strider at first does not even see the wraiths as they approach Frodo. Merry and Pippin simply collapse face-down in terror. The wraiths are ghostlike, and difficult to see. It is not precisely clear how Strider drives them off, but I believe they allow themselves to be driven off, believing that they have accomplished their goal.

In the film, the flight to the Ford is very dramatic. The wraiths are very physical, not ghostly at all, with heavy black robes and nasty, black, articulated armored gauntlets. There is a high-speed chase where Arwen carries Frodo, while the wraiths pursue her, their nasty black hands reaching for Frodo, who by this point is completely incapacitated, drooling green slime and breathing like a dying asthmatic frog.

In fact, he does die, or nearly die, on the far bank; Arwen has to give him some of her Elvish mojo, the "grace of the Eldar," to keep him alive. He passes out, and we see his point of view in which he is bathed in white light.

In the book, the whole lead-up to the crossing of the Ford of Bruinen is strangely sluggish. Tolkien devotes paragraph after paragraph to the twists and turns of the landscape, as it frustrates the party's ability to make rapid progress. While the wraiths are converging on Weathertop, Strider recites a portion of the Lay of Luthien. While Frodo is wounded and the party finds Bilbo's trolls, Sam recites a comic poem. There is not an enormous sense of urgency. In fact, we find out that the wraiths themsevles are not urgently pursuing Frodo -- they know that he has been wounded with a Morgul-blade, and they believe that it is just a matter of time before he falls under their control. They do not think there is any need to pursue him further physically, although they seriously underestimate his resistance to the Morgul blade, and by the time the party reaches the ford, they are desperate to keep him from entering Rivendell, where he will be beyond their power.

Frodo bears his wound for seventeen days, and it has healed over after the first few days. The wound is not infected in the usual sense, but in the film we get a glimpse of a diseased-looking open wound. Frodo's arm and shoulder become numb and cold, but he is not in danger of dying in the physical sense. The wraiths attempted to "pierce his heart" with the Morgul blade, which would have turned him into a wraith, but missed, because of his toughness in resisting them. There is a splinter of the blade still in the wound, working its way inward, and it eventually takes all of Elrond's skill to remove it (this important point is not mentioned in the movie, although the key point that the wound will never fully heal is mentioned). The sickness that the wound inflicts on him is more psychic than physical in nature. By the time he crosses the Ford, he is not dying physically, but instead his will to oppose the wraiths is nearly at an end, and he is on the threshold of becoming a wraith himself.

Then, of course, there is the use of Arwen. This is a controversial move among Tolkien fans. I actually completely approve of the expansion of Arwen's character; her relationship with Aragorn comes to life, and the expansion of her very minor role in the book into a full-fledged character brings to life a story which, in the book, is mostly confined to a brief account in the appendix. It also serves to bring to life the sorrow of the elves. In the book, it is all right for someone to simply expound upon the elves, but Jackson and his writing team wisely decide to show us, not just tell us, about this. The story of the love between Arwen and Aragorn echoes those key moments in the history of Middle Earth in which elves forsake their immortality to bond with mortals; these relationships are among the most interesting and dramatic parts of the Silmarillion and the Lost Tales. I love the sequence in which Arwen, riding towards the Gray Havens at her father's command, has a vision of her future children. The flash-forward to Aragorn's death, his aged body replaced by a beautiful tomb bearing his likeness in statuary, and her eventual surrender to mortality in the empty woods of Lothlorien is just magnificent. Her torment over her choice or mortality is beautifully presented. But -- and I believe this is a key factor in why I don't dislike these changes -- Jackson and the writing team here rearranged and expanded a role, rather than changing existing key elements of the story.

In the book, it is Glorfindel who comes to Frodo's aid, and who helps to defeat the wraiths. Now, it makes a certain amount of sense to eliminate Glorfindel from the movie. He has little or nothing else to do in the rest of the story. Tolkien's portrayal of him makes him seem a bit silly -- with bells on his saddle as if he were one of Santa's elves, but then, somewhat incongruously, he is revealed to Frodo as a powerful and frightening elf-lord. (In the film, we see instead Frodo's first vision of Arwen, in which she radiates light and he sees her as she appears in the spiritual realm). The character of Glorfindel makes sense if you've read the Silmarillion -- he is a ancient high elf, who beheld the light of the trees -- but there is nothing in the Lord of the Rings itself to adequately explain why he does not fear the wraiths. Instead, Arwen states outright that she does not fear them, and we have to go with that and with Frodo's vision.

The storyline is further simplified -- Aragorn and the hobbits have nothing to do with the physical victory over the wraiths. In the book, the wraiths are confronted with the terror of the magical flood before them and Glorfindel the elf-lord, together with Aragorn and the hobbits brandishing burning firebrands behind them. Everyone gets into the act.

The changes to the story also take away the opportunity for Frodo to demonstrate what "stern stuff" the hobbits are made of. Even on the verge of psychic (if not physical) collapse, Frodo rides Glorfindel's horse -- he is not carried -- to the ford. He defies the wraiths to the last, calling on them to go back to Mordor, until terror overcomes him and his strength gives out. This show of defiance, and the psychic burden that Frodo carries from his wound, is somewhat lost in Jackson's treatment.

Jackson is very good at articulating inner conflict in dream sequences and visions -- I think he could have used some of that skill to tell this part of the story with a little bit more subtlety, perhaps showing us Frodo's point of view as he gradually succumbed to terror and stood on the "threshold" of the other world himself. We would come to understand that "wraithworld" was not an on/off switch that Frodo activates when putting on the ring, and that he in fact was half in "wraithworld" by the time he reached Rivendell, and indeed that he could never quite free himself of the psychic wound which the Morgul blade inflicted upon him.

This could have allowed the story to retain the sense of urgency which Jackson and the writing team decided, quite rightly, was required for the film form, while making the wraiths even more frightening and Frodo's situation even more perilous than simply the risk of expiration due to green slime disease on the far shore of the Ford of Bruinen. Maybe the next time Lord of the Rings is filmed, this aspect of the story will be explored with a bit more subtlety.

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Destructuring

My friend Alan has been asking me questions about some Lisp programming idioms involving macros, such as destructuring-bind.

Destructuring, the idiom, is a technique in which the shape of a data structure can be determined at runtime, and the contents of the data structure bound to a set of variables.

More later.

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More Moleskines

I earlier wrote:

"I bought a set of three of the Volant notebooks as well as a Volant address book. Im disappointed to say that the quality doesn't match the traditional Moleskine notebooks..."

(In progress)

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The Moleskine

What follows is the merchange review I wrote for the Yahoo store Moleskine US. There has been interest recently in the Weblogging community in the idea of a pocket notebooks as the ideal "analog PDA." I was, and am still, pleased with my traditional pocket Moleskine notebook, but I am now also wondering if there might be other manufacturers out there that build notebooks of a similar form factor but perhaps with different features, such as a place to insert a pen, thicker paper with less show-through, or other features.

I had a vague hope that Moleskine US would read the review, which was CC'ed to them, and decide to send me a set of the Cahier notebooks to replace the Volant line that I was dissatisfied with. Now that would be customer service. I'm not going to demand it from them, though, especially given that a set of the Volant notebooks places them only at about $2.00 each. There's a limit to what I can expect in the low-cost line.

Anyway... original review notes follow. Now all I need is some vacation time so that I can spend some afternoons in cafes or on a beach actually writing something in my Moleskine!

Moleskines are the best handheld notebooks for writers: they are the perfect size for a shirt or coat pocket, and use good paper with a binding that is stitched rather than just glued, so they will stay open as you hold them to write. They also have a built-in cloth bookmark and an elastic band to hold them shut. Theres a little expanding pocket in the back where I can stuff receipts and loose notes. These little touches give a strong impression of time-tested, practical quality.

I really like my traditional Moleskine notebook and will probably buy more of them in the future. I am extremely satisfied with the service, packaging, and shipping speed of Moleskine US. There are a couple of areas where I feel there is some room for improvement:

It would be nice if the web site would allow me to log in as a return customer, and keep my shipping and payment information on hand, so I dont have to re-enter it if I come back to buy something more later.

The paper exhibits a little bit more show-through than Id like, when I write on both sides with a Rapidograph (liquid ink pen). I am guessing a fountain pen would have a similar issue. I should probably try the sketchbook type, but that paper is thicker, which means either a fatter notebook or fewer pages, so there is a tradeoff.

I bought a set of three of the Volant notebooks as well as a Volant address book. Im disappointed to say that the quality doesn't match the traditional Moleskine notebooks. I knew that they would not have the the bookmark and elastic band, but I did not expect the paper to be of lower quality: it has a rougher feel, and absorbs more ink, with more show-through. The last 16 pages are micro-perforated and can be torn out. That feature doesnt really appeal to me. But the big problem is the cover material. My address book had a big crease on the frong cover where the plastic faux-leather material was not flat and properly glued to the backing. One of the others has bubbles.

I like the thinner form, and they are much less expensive per notebook than the traditional Moleskine, but I was just thinking that the Volant line might be better with plain cardboard covers. Lo and behold, today I discovered that Moleskine US is now offering the Cahier line, which seems to be just that, a Volant with a cardboard cover, and which also includes the pocket in back. I will try those next time. If they have the higher-quality paper, I'll declare them the perfect thin-format notebook to go with the traditional Moleskine.

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Wed, 16 Feb 2005 The AirPort Express Saga Continues

So, the AirPort Express is still not entirely right in the head - it didn't die the way it did before, but Grace was always informing me that either she couldn't print, or her computer would not connect; it either would not automatically reconnect after sleep, despite supplying the network control panel with the network name and password, or sometimes also could not connect even when explicitly supplying the private network name and password. Sometimes the configuration utility, running from my wired PowerBook, could not even find the device. It had apparently crashed. After power-cycling the device, Grace's computer was always able to connect to it.

The last time, I finally decided to give up having a private network, and just make it an open share. There are several others in the neighborhood.

This seems to have made it work reliably again (so far). But I didn't really want an open share. I'm not trying to be a bad citizen; it is just not in our mission statement to supply a public network access point.

I'm not sure what the problem is, but I am disappointed in the reliability of this setup. I don't think the problem is in Grace's computer, since it will connect flawlessly to other wireless networks. For a device without a power switch, cycling the power should not be required.

Then, there are printing problems: sometimes when printing large photographs, the print queue seems to bog down so much that the printer gives up waiting for data and resets the job, spitting out the unfinished picture. I would give up on printer sharing, but given that it is a USB printer, it cannot be shared on the network directly. The alternative is to share it through my PowerBook, which seems to work more reliably but which requires my PowerBook to be on all the time, or requires Grace to remember to wake it up before she tries to print.

I guess this would not be an issue if we had a server machine, but it seemed very convenient to just use the AirPort Express. And it would be, if it worked well. But it seems like the box is just slightly unreliable in several ways. And it isn't like our setup, one wireless PowerBook, used mostly to read e-mail, and one inkjet printer, used only occasionally, should be a serious stress-test. I suppose I need to check to see if there is a firmware upgrade. Sigh...

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Programming Projects, Part 5

I've given up on VMWare, since I was not truly happy with it, and thanks to Paragon's Partition Manager, gotten my system set up in a decent configuration again, with enough disk space for both Linux and Windows 2000. So, for now, I'll just dual-boot.

My original G4 PowerBook, and my wife's iBook, both of year 2000 vintage, are both on their last legs, so we need to be ready to update our Mac infrastructure. We haven't quite figured out what to buy or, of course, how to pay for it.

I have not selected a project, but one that comes to mind now is editing iTunes file metadata. I've got all of Tolkien's works in audiobook form. The individual volumes such as the Fellowship of the Ring contain about 16 disks, and about 23 tracks each. Let's say I want to rename all of those 300+ tracks, as well as the disc (folder), following some pattern, and including the track x of y and disc m of n metadata in the file name, with the numbers padded so that the full filenames sort correctly. I'm doing it by hand now. Hmmm. I am not sure if iTunes exposes that much of itself to scripting, but if it does, it might be an interesting little trial problem.

Alan has been tossing me questions and ideas about Lisp. The latest was destructuring. I'll drop this "Programming Projects" topic for now and write some shorter notes on individual Lisp topics, although my ability to put time into hobby projects remains rather limited. Also, I really, really could use a brief vacation, preferably somewhere sunny, where my brain could absorb some photons and spend some time relaxing with my family. But alas, I don't have the vacation days. Maybe I can arrange something when this project is ended, although it may have to be unpaid time off. I'm almost willing to go that route.

[/root/geeky/programming/lispish] permanent link

Star Trek: Season One

Star Trek inspires love, ridicule, or a mixture of both, but most people have at least a passing familiarity with the long-running cultural phenomenon. I am certainly fa