tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-75458637935597989182024-03-17T09:32:40.497-07:00Journal of a ProgrammerShort notes and essays about stuff that interests me (mostly technical stuff).Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.comBlogger2574125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-12413621410388386382024-03-17T09:32:00.000-07:002024-03-17T09:32:08.093-07:00Sweet Thursday: a very short review<p>
One day, on a trip from somewhere to somewhere else, we happened to stop at <a href="https://steinbeck.org/" target="_blank">the National Steinbeck Center</a> in Salinas, California. If you've never been to the Steinbeck Center, but you happen to be in Salinas and can spare a bit of time, you should definitely visit; it's a very interesting place.
</p>
<p>
While we were there, I stopped by the gift shop and picked up a copy of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Thursday" target="_blank"><i>Sweet Thursday</i></a>, a Steinbeck work that I wasn't familiar with.
</p>
<p>
<i>Sweet Thursday</i> is a sequel to the much more famous <i>Cannery Row</i>, and returns to the same setting and the same characters, for the most part. <i>Cannery Row</i> was set before WWII, <i>Sweet Thursday</i> was set after WWII, and there are many other ways to compare and contrast the two.
</p>
<p>
I think that if you liked or loved <i>Cannery Row</i>, you'll probably like or love <i>Sweet Thursday</i> just about as much. And, possibly, if it's been a while since you read <i>Cannery Row</i>, you might like <i>Sweet Thursday</i> even a bit more, since it will bring nostalgia and reminiscing about those earlier stories and how much you liked them and how nice it is to read some more about all those kooky characters.
</p>
<p>
Of course, the converse is true: if you found <i>Cannery Row</i> to be gimmicky and shallow, you probably won't enjoy <i>Sweet Thursday</i>
</p>
<p>
Happily for me, I was in the first camp, and I enjoyed <i>Sweet Thursday</i> very much.
</p>
<p>
It helps that I have always loved reading Steinbeck, and it also helps that the format of <i>Sweet Thursday</i>, with its three to eight page mini-chapters, is pretty much ideal for a commute-time reader, who has a scant 15 minutes of uninterrupted ferry-boat time for the occasional read. It was wonderful to carry <i>Sweet Thursday</i> around in my backpack, and pick it up when I had a few spare minutes, and read just one chapter, or maybe two.
</p>
<p>
Stretching it out this way may have even made me like <i>Sweet Thursday</i> better; I don't know. I think although it is quite short and easy to read, it was not actually meant to be rushed through, but rather to be sipped and savored, reflecting on those earlier times.
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-70504918534876188832024-03-06T07:06:00.000-08:002024-03-06T07:06:05.746-08:00Kinda super Wednesday<p>
So California joined Super Tuesday, hoping that would bring more enthusiasm for primary elections and for elections in general in these parts.
</p>
<p>
<a href="https://www.acgov.org/rovresults/251/" target="_blank">Our county's website</a> has a quick take on the answer to that question.
</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdBeh5JLtDec1CiXX5wEDDMJuz-UCMOieb5ny_1-BOi-qV4xS3V1c-kG78WA2Reyof1777DDYR9dY1W2sOPUK0UTtE-4DWXRq7JcV4mtFFrdkzezx7H5hH6Fp4mHXUS_h3aJGjaqAUREkagg2FbyDimz8EkApDEPYKJNRP7IPUguqcfwynm9MhgtylT17g/s2130/Screen%20Shot%202024-03-06%20at%207.05.31%20AM.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="400" data-original-height="334" data-original-width="2130" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdBeh5JLtDec1CiXX5wEDDMJuz-UCMOieb5ny_1-BOi-qV4xS3V1c-kG78WA2Reyof1777DDYR9dY1W2sOPUK0UTtE-4DWXRq7JcV4mtFFrdkzezx7H5hH6Fp4mHXUS_h3aJGjaqAUREkagg2FbyDimz8EkApDEPYKJNRP7IPUguqcfwynm9MhgtylT17g/s400/Screen%20Shot%202024-03-06%20at%207.05.31%20AM.png"/></a></div>
<p>
More practice needed.
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-72794449259952106872024-03-02T20:11:00.000-08:002024-03-02T20:11:58.886-08:00Bone: a very short review<p>
My holiday gift from my sister-in-law was the marvelous <a href="https://www.boneville.com/product/bone-one-volume-black-white-edition-softcover-24th-printing/" target="_blank"><i>Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume</i></a>, Jeff Smith's career-defining work.
</p>
<p>
<i>Bone</i> is quite the gift to receive. It's almost one thousand four hundred pages long, and it's big enough that you can lose your coffee cup behind it. I have to confess: at first it was a little intimidating.
</p>
<p>
But a nice quiet day happened along, and there it was, waiting for me, and so I dove in.
</p>
<p>
Well, there went 2.5 months!
</p>
<p>
<i>Bone</i> is everything you could want from a fantasy epic. It has demons, dragons, monsters and villains galore. It has the lovely Princess Thorn and her force-of-nature grandmother. It has cow races!
</p>
<p>
But most of all, it has Fone Bone, the most lovable and approachable hero in many a year.
</p>
<p>
It takes a while to read a 1400 page book, even if it is a graphic novel.
</p>
<p>
But it was worth every page and I enjoyed it through to the end.
</p>
<p>
I hope <i>Bone</i> is read for generations to come, it's definitely got staying power.
</p>
<p>
Confession time: the dragon was the best, but Ted the cricket was superb, and I really liked Roque Ja.
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-55155676202354932832024-02-21T07:01:00.000-08:002024-02-21T07:01:40.980-08:00Ted Chiang on AI<p>
Have you read Ted Chiang's <a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway#.vp1ylDRDR" target="_blank"><i>Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear</i></a> ?
</p>
<p>
It's beyond remarkable that this essay is more than six years old at this point, it's still astonishingly accurate and insightful.
</p>
<blockquote>
Elon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association and told them that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”
<br/><br/>
...
<br/><br/>
... in its pursuit of a seemingly innocuous goal, an AI could bring about the extinction of humanity purely as an unintended side effect.
</blockquote>
<p>
But as Chiang observes, this really isn't a discussion about runaway superintelligence, it's a discussion about modern capitalism.
</p>
<blockquote>
Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences? Who adopts a scorched-earth approach to increasing market share? This hypothetical strawberry-picking AI does what every tech startup wishes it could do — grows at an exponential rate and destroys its competitors until it’s achieved an absolute monopoly. The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism.
</blockquote>
<p>
Chiang's essay is extremely important, even more important now than when he wrote it more than six years ago.
</p>
<p>
I hope more people will go back and rediscover this under-acknowledged gem, and read it all the way through, and re-read it some more, and go and tell everyone they know about it.
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-15150052210559186732024-02-15T12:46:00.000-08:002024-02-15T12:46:30.306-08:00Oh how embarassing...<p>
The Sunday crossword had a clue:
</p>
<ul>
<li>Agricola author</li>
</ul>
<p>
I was getting all irate that neither "Rosenberg" nor "Uwe Rosenberg" fit.
</p>
<p>
Heh.
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-91419550286583200082024-02-05T10:53:00.000-08:002024-02-05T10:53:17.608-08:00Well what the heck, worth a try!<blockquote>
Dead & Company: Dead Forever - Live at Sphere - Reserved Seating
Fri · May 31, 2024 · 7:30 PM
</blockquote>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-24819940908804694532024-01-15T17:53:00.000-08:002024-01-15T17:53:16.172-08:00Important mathematical observation<p>
January 2024 happens to be a period of time during which, with a very small number of exceptions,
</p>
<ul>
<li>All of the people born in 19<b>61</b> are <b>62</b> years old, </li>
<li>while all of the people born in 19<b>62</b> are <b>61</b> years old</li>
</ul>
<p>
We state this without proof.
</p>
Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-14924128472349557002024-01-09T10:46:00.000-08:002024-01-09T10:46:49.437-08:00All the Years Combine: a very short review<p>
Ray Robertson, a Canadian writer best known for other genres, joins the long list of people who have written books about the Grateful Dead and their music with his <a href="https://www.biblioasis.com/shop/new-releases/all-the-years-combine/" target="_blank"><i>All the Years Combine: the Grateful Dead in Fifty Shows</i></a>.
</p>
<p>
Robertson has the clever idea to orient his book around the band's <b>concerts</b>. Most other books about the Grateful Dead take much more traditional approaches:
</p>
<ul>
<li>many are memoirs, by members of the band themselves (Lesh, Kreutzmann, etc.) or by members of the larger organization (road crew, managers, engineers, etc.)</li>
<li>some are biographies, of individuals and of the band as a whole</li>
<li>others are directly about the songs and music themselves, as more conventional music criticism</li>
</ul>
<p>
But very few have written directly about the band's enormous thirty year catalog of concerts (a notable exception to that is <a href="https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501704321/cornell-77/#bookTabs=1" target="_blank"><i>Cornell '77</i></a>, an entire book about a <b>single</b> concert).
</p>
<p>
There are at least two good reasons why this is indeed a clever idea:
</p>
<ul>
<li>Firstly, the material is <b>unusual</b>. The band made the decision very early on to encourage and emphasize recording and preservation of their live concerts. This was performed by the band themselves, who invested heavily in both equipment and personnel to enable capturing the shows as accurately and completely as possible, and then preserved that collection of material over the following six decades. But it was also performed by the fans, first rather anarchically, then later under the acceptance and support of the band, who made and curated and traded their own recordings of the shows. I have fond memories of friends who knew tapers and shared tapes of their favorite shows.
<br/><br/>
Moreover, although Robertson doesn't overly dwell on this, the Grateful Dead were present at many of the seminal live performances of popular music during an extended period of several decades: the Summer of Love concerts, the Acid Test events, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimme_Shelter_%281970_film%29" target="_blank">the Altamont Free Concert</a>, Woodstock, Watkins Glen, <a href="https://www.thenationalnews.com/weekend/2023/09/15/at-the-foot-of-ancient-power-the-grateful-deads-1978-egypt-shows-revisited/" target="_blank">the Concerts at the Pyramids</a>, etc.
<br/><br/>
This is rare, at least in popular music, and this rarity by itself makes it noteworthy.
<br/><br/></li>
<li>Secondarly, the concerts were <b>important</b> to the entire artistic process for the band. The Grateful Dead had a very unusual creative process, with multiple composers, multiple songwriters, influences from many other popular music genres, and so on. But also they had a very strong culture of music <b>performance</b>. In this respect the band drank deeply from musical areas such as jazz, blues, gospel, and bluegrass, in which improvisational performance, audience interaction, and other techniques were practiced in their music to a much greater extent than most people realized. As Phil Lesh noted, the studio recordings that the Grateful Dead made were generally viewed, even by the band themselves, as just advertisements for their live performances.
<br/><br/>
This totally inverts the general approach taken by most popular musicians over the past 50 years (and still now): whereas the typical musician tours in support of the new album, the Grateful Dead nearly always issued a new album to support the upcoming tour.
<br/><br/>
Understanding this is critical to undertanding why attending a Grateful Dead show in the 60's, 70's, and 80's was such an unusual experience: you weren't just hearing songs that you already knew and loved being performed by the artist in a live setting, you were actually <b>participating</b> in the composing, refining, and elaboration of works that were still in progress, still in the process of development.
<br/><br/>
Very few artists had the willingness to experiment with unfinished new material live, in front of a large paying audience, before it had been thoroughly worked through and rehearsed and revised behind closed doors. And fewer still would see this as a process that they <b>wanted</b> to use. So this makes it worth describing.<br/><br/></li>
</ul>
<p>
Robertson is enthusiastic about his subject, and he's an enthusiastic writer, and reading <i>All the Years Combine</i> you get a good dose of his passion and enthusiasm and excitement.
</p>
<p>
It doesn't make for great literature; it's more like sitting around in some late-night diner after the show has ended, swapping observations about the event with your buddies, reveling in the high points and laughing about the missteps.
</p>
<p>
It's not the sort of thing that translates well to the printed page, and I think it's unlikely we'll see a lot of additional works attempting to do what Robertson has tried to accomplish.
</p>
<p>
But I definitely enjoyed the book, and happily sent it on to another Deadhead friend of mine.
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-23968023249136548772024-01-05T12:18:00.000-08:002024-01-05T12:18:37.180-08:00Rebel Moon, reviewed by somebody else.<p>
<a href="https://www.sfgate.com/streaming/article/netflix-rebel-moon-review-18590021.php?utm_content=cta&sid=53b77694fdd5ac234d000377&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=roundup&utm_campaign=sfgt%20%7C%20the%20daily&stn=nf" target="_blank">This review of <i>Rebel Moon</i> by SFChronicle columnist Drew Magary, is the best and most accurate movie review</a> I've seen in years. Every word is oh, so true.
</p>
<blockquote>
I am suffering. This movie is awful and promises to get no better. None of the characters are interesting. All of the visuals look like a high-budget Scorpions video. The script is like if you assigned a dozen seventh graders 10 pages each. And the fight scenes are boring as s—t. The more of “Rebel Moon” I watch, the more running time I appear to have left. You should get your name on a wall for finishing this movie, like when you polish off the 96-ounce London broil at Jim Bob’s Steak Barn. I really want to stop watching “Rebel Moon” and play some PlayStation. The effects alone would be 10 times better, and I can just finish the movie tomorrow morning. But I’ve come too far now. At this point, “Rebel Moon” is less a movie to me than it is a challenge, and I refuse to back down. I will defeat this movie, even if I die in slow motion while trying.
</blockquote>
<p>
My review, had I bothered to even try to write one, would have been nowhere near as fun to read as Magary's, but would have come to precisely the same conclusion.
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-62814136104198195012023-12-28T09:35:00.000-08:002023-12-28T09:35:59.749-08:00Starfield: a very short review<p>
If you follow computer gaming at all, I'm sure you've already learned about <a href="https://bethesda.net/en/game/starfield" target="_blank">Starfield</a>, but just in case: it's an open world RPG set several hundred years into the future, in outer space.
</p>
<p>
Your adventures consist mostly of flying around from star to star, and then from planet to planet near certain stars. You can land on various planets and (somewhat) explore them. In the Starfield universe, there are a lot of stars, and a lot of planets. Each planet is different, and some of them allow for fairly complex exploration.
</p>
<p>
As you go around, you have various encounters: with people, with alien life, etc. What you do in those encounters determines a lot of what sort of experiences you have playing Starfield.
</p>
<p>
Starfield was developed by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethesda_Softworks" target="_blank">Bethesda</a>, one of the oldest computer game developers, known for gaming franchises such as The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, so if you know anything about those games, you know a fair amount about what Starfield is like.
</p>
<p>
As you travel around in the game, you meet different people, who have different stories and viewpoints, and many of those people offer to engage with you. They may operate stores, taverns, hotels, space ports, etc.; they may give you quests; they may become companions and join you on your travels, etc.
</p>
<p>
There are a lot of quests. If you don't like doing quests, you probably don't like to play computer role playing games, and then Starfield wouldn't appeal to you, but then you probably won't have read this far in this little article.
</p>
<p>
It has taken me more than 50 hours of playtime to get to the point where I'm starting to really enjoy Starfield. It's large, complex, and elaborate. You can invest less time in the game, but then you might not get as much out of it.
</p>
<p>
Starfield is a really nerdy game. The developers spent a lot of time thinking about what it might be like in a possible future where space travel is possible, and the game primarily appeals (I suspect) to people who are interested in this topic themselves.
</p>
<p>
But it also means that Starfield is the sort of computer game where the loading screens display messages like:
</p>
<blockquote>
The Iron family of inorganic resources includes Alkanes, Tantalum, and Ytterbium.
</blockquote>
<p>
So again, that sort of tells you whether you might be interested in this game or not.
</p>
<p>
Given the size and complexity of Starfield, it's hard for me to find enough time to really play it as it's meant to be played, for long stints of several hours or more at a time.
</p>
<p>
So check back in with me in another six months or so, when I'll probably have been playing Starfield for several hundred hours, and then maybe I'll have more to say.
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-17723339879887620882023-12-24T10:22:00.000-08:002023-12-24T10:22:50.894-08:00The Blackpool Highflyer: a very short review<p>
Andrew Martin has found quite a bit of success with <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/series/43691-jim-stringer" target="_blank">his Jim Stringer series of railroad-themed detective stories</a>. Our hero is a railway worker and amateur sleuth; the books are set in the glory days of the English railroads, principally the first decade of the 1900's.
</p>
<p>
<i>The Blackpool Highflyer</i>, second in the series but the only one I've read so far, is charming and completely fun to read, with just enough mystery to justify Martin's true delight, which is to relive this particular period in history with as much attention to detail as he can possibly summon up.
</p>
<p>
In particular, Martin works extremely, extremely hard to match his descriptions and dialogue to the language of the day, for the English that was regularly used in, say, 1905, is already quite a distance from the English that is used now, just 120 years later.
</p>
<p>
This means peppering his text with lots of unfamiliar-to-me words. Some of them were railway jargon, others were variant spellings of words I know, and still others were amusing curses of the day.
</p>
<p>
But more interesting to me were those passages that were entirely full of ordinary words, but were used in a style that so far pre-dated me that it seemed somehow foreign and from another language (though it was merely from another time), sort of like the effect when you are first struggling to understand something written hundreds of years ago.
</p>
<blockquote>
She was pointing at the letters spelling 'Dean Clough' standing up on the roof of the building just beyond the North Bridge. Each letter was taller than three men, and although the North Bridge was high enough to fit the goods station underneath, those letters towered above it. The Dean Clough Mill seemed to have been built by men who'd never seen another mill, and so had no notion of the correct size, but what they did have was an endless supply of bricks. You could fit twenty mills of the common run inside it. It was built by the Crossleys, who also -- along with a certain Porter -- put up the brass for the orphanage where young Arnold Dyson now lived.
</blockquote>
<p>
The whole book is like that. I suppose you either like that or you don't. And I mostly did.
</p>
<p>
Andrew Martin is clever and talented, and I can't really fault his approach. But with all the books to read in the world, maybe one dose of 1905 was enough for me.
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-69937521880173116822023-11-18T08:59:00.000-08:002023-11-18T08:59:29.215-08:00A little bit of Oakland sports history<p>
As we watch the completion of the winding down of "Big Four" professional sports in Oakland ...
</p>
<p>
(The NBA Warriors moved to San Francisco in 2019, the NFL Raiders moved to Las Vegas in 2020, and the MLB Athletics move to Las Vegas next year. And, yes, I know about <a href="https://www.oaklandrootssc.com/" target="_blank">the Oakland Roots</a>)
</p>
<p>
... let's take a moment to admire <a href="https://twitter.com/SNFonNBC/status/1723734536498868660" target="_blank">a lovely bit of tying past to present</a>.
</p>
<p>
<a href="https://www.raiders.com/news/heidi-bowl-3579281" target="_blank">Here's the backstory</a>, if that link made you go "huh?"
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-32732051773553199062023-10-23T15:31:00.000-07:002023-10-23T15:31:33.432-07:00Stormputer reborn!<p>
Amazingly, <a href="https://bryanpendleton.blogspot.com/2016/07/storm-puter-lives.html" target="_blank">seven years have passed since Dan built Stormputer</a>. At that moment, it was certainly state of the art and astonishingly powerful, and in the intervening time, it's been everything I wanted, and completely reliable.
</p>
<p>
But anyone who's not been living in a cave knows that the last 10 years have seen enormous innovation in computer technology, most significantly in the area of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit" target="_blank">GPUs</a>. Computer graphics is of course one of the oldest areas in the world of computing, but the recent innovation in GPUs has been driven by people who have found new uses for these specialized and extraordinarily powerful devices. Cryptography, blockchains, neural networks, and other non-video applications have catapaulted companies such as <a href="https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/" target="_blank">nVidia</a> to the top of the computing world's leaders.
</p>
<p>
And during the seven years of Stormputer's existence, nVidia released <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units" target="_blank">a vast number of new GPUs</a>. The GeForce 10 series which we used in Stormputer was succeeded by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_20_series" target="_blank">GeForce 20 series</a> in 2018, by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_30_series" target="_blank">GeForce 30 series</a> in 2020, and by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_40_series" target="_blank">GeForce 40 series</a> in 2022.
</p>
<p>
So, it being 2023, I asked Dan if he thought it was possible to replace the 1070 GPU that I was using with <a href="https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/40-series/rtx-4070-4070ti/" target="_blank">a GeForce RTX 4070 Ti</a>.
</p>
<p>
Dan, bless his heart, replied "Sure!", and so we set about figuring out the details.
</p>
<p>
Which turned out to be a lot!
</p>
<p>
The 4070 Ti is a very large piece of equipment, so to start with you need to have a full size case to mount it. Moreover, due to its size and weight, that graphics card comes with a special additional steel brace to allow it to be supported fully by the case, rather than imposing too much stress on my motherboard's PCI slot. It also needs special power cables (supplied by Gigabyte as part of the 4070 Ti).
</p>
<p>
Those special power cables, in turn, needed to be connected to a modern, more powerful, and more sophisticated Power Supply, so we upgraded to <a href="https://www.evga.com/products/Specs/PSU.aspx?pn=71d331b7-9306-4218-987f-875fd422fd44" target="_blank">a wonderful EVGA 1000w G5 SuperNova 80Plus Gold</a> power supply, which comes with its own new 15Amp-rated power code to the house power.
</p>
<p>
As long as we had the case open, and were re-wiring everything with new power cables etc., it was a good time for a general tuneup, so we also added:
</p>
<ul>
<li>32GB of <a href="https://www.gskill.com/product/165/185/1536026953/F4-3000C16D-32GISB" target="_blank">G.SKILL Aegis DDR4 RAM</a></li>
<li>A <a href="https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/solid-state-drives/ssd-970-evo-plus-nvme-m-2-2-tb-mz-v7s2t0b-am/" target="_blank">Samsung 970 EVO NVMe M.2 2TB</a> storage device.</li>
</ul>
<p>
Not only do we use every inch of the lovely Stormputer full size case, when we seated the new GPU in the motherboard slot, we discovered that one of the case fans no longer fit, as it physically had no room left in that part of the case.
</p>
<p>
So far, so great! The control software confirms that all the temperatures are running well, and we aren't seeing any alarms in the Event Viewer.
</p>
<p>
Hopefully I'll get seven more years of great PC performance out of Stormputer!
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-51702770946620632682023-09-26T14:39:00.000-07:002023-09-26T14:39:16.325-07:00SFGate shows Semifreddi's some love<p>
My favorite bakery is a local outfit that's been in business for nearly 40 years. Here's a great article about a great local business: <a href="https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/bay-area-semifreddis-bakery-nears-40-years-18376287.php?sid=53b77694fdd5ac234d000377&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=roundup&utm_campaign=sfgt%20%7C%20the%20daily&stn=nf" target="_blank"><i>This 40-year old Bay Area bakery makes 190,000 loaves every week</i></a>
</p>
<blockquote>
At the center of the active bread-making operation is Semifreddi’s CEO Tom Frainier, who prefers to be called the “chief bootlicker,” and chief creative officer Mike Rose, who is best known by his 126 employees as Semifeddi’s “mad scientist.” Among the many hats they wear, the co-owners are Semifreddi’s official taste-testers for the 45 breads and baked goods the 39-year-old bakery produces.
</blockquote>
<p>
The story has great details of how a business gets created.
</p>
<blockquote>
By 1988, Barbara gained two new business partners with unconventional backgrounds: her husband and Frainier (her brother). Unlike Barbara, Rose and Frainier’s professional backgrounds couldn’t be further from the culinary world. For the previous 10 years, Rose had worked as a sales representative at import company Albert Kessler. He said Barbara helped him learn the ropes at the bakery while he devoured the fundamentals of baking in cookbooks in his spare time. Nevertheless, it was no piece of cake.
<br/><br/>
“It was a learning process,” Rose recalls of his early days. “Bread is simple yet challenging and complicated. I had some beginner’s luck but not enough humility at first.”
</blockquote>
<p>
A crucial observation was that the owners deliberately decided not to grow beyond the size they felt they could handle.
</p>
<blockquote>
Around the bakery’s 20th anniversary in 2004, Rose and Frainier turned down an investor who urged them to open a Semifreddi’s outpost in Los Angeles. Years later, they don’t regret the decision. They preferred to err on the side of caution to keep Semifreddi’s a local treasure and avoid the route of becoming a frozen food aisle item.
</blockquote>
Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-6951392676578139562023-09-15T07:58:00.000-07:002023-09-15T07:58:37.620-07:00There are FAQs, and then there are FAQs<p>
Simple and yet at the same time clear and precise, may I (without permission) share with you the FAQ with which <a href="https://dvd.com/Faq" target="_blank">dvd.com</a> closes its doors after 25 years and says goodbye.
</p>
<blockquote>
Our Final Season
<p>Frequently Asked Questions
<p>Q. When is the last day you'll ship out discs?
<br>A. On April 18th, we announced that after 25 years of shipping DVDs, this will be our Final Season, and we'll ship our last disc on September 29th, 2023.
<p>Q. Do I need to return any remaining discs after the last shipping day?
<br>A. You will not be charged for any unreturned discs - please enjoy them for as long as you like! If you do choose to return the disc, we will continue to accept returns until October 27th, 2023.
<p>Q. Can I purchase discs from DVD Netflix?
<br>A. We are unable to sell discs from our rental inventory.
<p>Q. What if my last disc shipment gets lost or has an issue?
<br>A. September 29th is our last day of shipping operations, so we will not be able to ship replacement discs after September 29th. Make sure you prioritize your must-watch titles in your queue so they can ship with some time to spare.
<p>Q. When will I stop being billed?
<br>A. Your last bill was in August. After your August payment, you will continue to receive service until our final shipping day, September 29th.
<p>Q. Can I keep a copy of the data related to my DVD subscription?
<br>A.
Many of our members have years of movie-watching memories with DVD Netflix, so we are providing a downloadable PDF copy of your data with information about your queue, rental history, ratings, and reviews in our Data Download.
<p>
At any time up until Oct 27, 2023 a current DVD subscriber or former DVD customer whose DVD subscription was canceled within the past 9 months may download their data, via our Data Download (<a href="https://dvd.netflix.com/Download" target="_blank">https://dvd.netflix.com/Download</a>), which includes:
<ul>
<li>Your queue
<li>Your rental history
<li>Your ratings
<li>Your reviews
</ul>
<p>Per our privacy policy, you may request a report of your personal data currently stored by Netflix via: <a href="https://www.netflix.com/account/getmyinfo" target="_blank">https://www.netflix.com/account/getmyinfo</a>.
<p>
<p>Q. What if I have both streaming and DVD subscriptions?
<br>A. Your current streaming subscription will not be impacted. Your DVD subscription will automatically be canceled on the last shipping day.
<p>Q. If I keep my account active until you shut down, is there anything special I have to do to close out my account?
<br>A. You do not need to take any action. After the final shipping date, your DVD subscription will be automatically canceled.
<p>Q. What will happen to my personal information related to my DVD subscription?
<br>A.
Most personal information related to DVD subscriptions will be deleted at the end of the DVD subscription service, no earlier than Oct 27, 2023 and no later than Jan 1, 2024. The data include:
<p>Mailing address(es)
<ul>
<li>Queue
<li>Rental/shipping history
<li>Ratings
<li>Reviews
<li>Taste preferences / genre ratings
</ul>
<p>Data which will be preserved after that time include:
<ul>
<li>Name and login information
<li>DVD billing history (including tax data)
<li>Charges for unreturned discs (including tax data)
</ul>
Data related to your streaming subscription will not be impacted.
<p>Q. When is the last day I can sign up for a DVD plan?
<br>A. You are no longer able to sign up for a DVD plan.
<p>Q. When is the last day I can change my plan?
<br>A. You are no longer able to change your DVD plan.
<p>Q. Why are you closing?
<br>A. After an incredible 25 year run, we've made the difficult decision to wind down at the end of September. Our goal has always been to provide the best service for our members, but as the DVD business continues to shrink, that's going to become increasingly difficult. Making 2023 our Final Season allows us to maintain our quality of service through the last day and go out on a high note.
</blockquote>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-59250202052681100032023-09-13T06:32:00.000-07:002023-09-13T06:32:04.305-07:00Fascinating food chain safety article from Undark Magazine<p>
I happened upon this Undark Magazine article about food safety challenges in turmeric markets in Bangladesh: <a href="https://undark.org/2023/07/19/the-vice-of-spice-confronting-lead-tainted-turmeric/" target="_blank">The Vice of Spice: Confronting Lead-Tainted Turmeric</a>.
</p>
<p>
It discusses a problem I was wholly unfamiliar with.
</p>
<p>
The article talks about a practice of some turmeric traders: they can make their product sell better if the spice looks better.
</p>
<blockquote>
While processing raw turmeric to powder, he added a chemical called lead chromate to get the tubers to glow yellow. Sheikh and the locals refer to the compound as peuri — and nearly all the farmers and traders at the market are familiar with it. Lead chromate is a chemical used in paints to, for instance, make school buses yellow, and it can enhance the radiance of turmeric roots, making them more attractive to buyers.
</blockquote>
<p>
This is a nearly universal fact of buying and selling food: food that looks better sells better.
</p>
<p>
But lead, of course, is a horrible poison when ingested, and so this was resulting in terrible consequences, both within Bangladesh and even beyond.
</p>
<blockquote>
Studies conducted in Boston, New York City, North Carolina, Colorado, and Washington have all found a connection between consumption of lead-tainted turmeric (mostly procured from markets overseas) and elevated blood-lead levels.
</blockquote>
<p>
The article notes that the problem may even spread beyond just turmeric to other food products.
</p>
<blockquote>
Many of the turmeric wholesalers selling in Shyambazar have been at it for more than 30 years. Law enforcement, they said, had only showed up for the turmeric. No other spices, they noted, have ever come under scrutiny.
</blockquote>
<p>
The article also points out that this is a global problem, and extremely challenging:
</p>
<blockquote>
Ending food fraud entirely for any commodity is a huge challenge, said Roberts, the food fraud expert from UCLA. Regulatory agencies in different countries need to set clear standards, enable constant testing and surveillance, and be willing to enforce penalties when someone has committed fraud.
</blockquote>
<p>
It's a well-written article, and worth reading the entire thing.
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-59238459337687906962023-09-06T17:00:00.000-07:002023-09-06T17:00:22.981-07:00Gloomhaven Cragheart rules question (warning some spoilers)<p>
So we were playing Gloomhaven (digital edition) and we were playing scenario 43, Drake Nest.
</p>
<p>
I was playing Cragheart at a fairly high level, and I had the level 3 card Clear the Way equipped.
</p>
<p>
We were in the mid- to late-scenario, and I felt it was a good time to use the bottom of Clear the Way. (It was the first time I'd ever activated the bottom half of Clear the Way, so this was a new experience for me.)
</p>
<p>
Time for some pictures!
</p>
<p>
First,<a href="https://i.imgur.com/fCzvRcC.jpeg" target="_blank"> here's "Clear the Way"</a>.
</p>
<p>
And here's <a href="https://gloomhavenwetbandits.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/scenario-43-drake-nest1.jpg" target="_blank">the Drake Nest map</a>.
</p>
<p>
I want you to focus on the top room in the map, the one with the treasure chest in it.
</p>
<p>
The entrance door to that room is at the bottom center of the treasure chest room, and it connects to the top center of the main central room in the map. And that entrance door, as you can clearly see in the picture, is ringed by 3 STUN traps, arranged in a semi-circle just before you reach the door.
</p>
<p>
My Cragheart character started the round standing in the doorway at the top left of the main central room, the door which connects to the narrow left-hand-side room with the 3 gold piles and the 6 drakes. That door was open; in fact Cragheart had just finished motoring through that left-hand-side room, together with one of the other characters in our party, having dealt with the 6 drakes.
</p>
<p>
As I said, it was mid- to late-scenario, and we'd cleared most of the rooms, and we felt it was time to enter the treasure chest room and engage those 5 monsters in battle.
</p>
<p>
But those traps were annoying! We knew that if any of our weakened, late-game characters triggered one of those traps, and was then stunned until the end of the next round, it'd be a sitting duck!
</p>
<p>
So here's where I came up with a plan to use the bottom half of Clear the Way. Notice that Clear the Way's bottom half reads:
</p>
<ul>
<li>Move 5</li>
<li>Jump</li>
<li>Destroy all obstacles and disarm all traps moved through.
</ul>
<p>
So when my turn came, I revealed Clear the Way and began my movement. I moved 3 hexes, and on the third hex I moved into the left-most of the three traps. But of course the trap did nothing because my card caused me to disarm it.
</p>
<p>
Then for my 4th hex of movement, I moved onto the closed door and opened it. This revealed the treasure chest room and all its monsters, and it drew cards for those monsters.
</p>
<p>
Then I took my 5th hex of movement, and I moved into the rightmost of the three traps.
</p>
<p>
At that point, the game sprung the trap, and told me I was now STUN-ned, and ended my turn at that point.
</p>
<p>
And Cragheart was stunned, and all those 5 monsters immediately came and attacked Cragheart, and then Cragheart was still stunned the next round, and had to long rest, and it was only by the narrowest of margins that the Tinkerer was able to race over and use 3 healing actions in a row to keep Cragheart alive through the deluge of monster attacks.
</p>
<p>
So now here's the rules question:
</p>
<blockquote>
I don't understand! Why didn't my card disarm the second trap, the one that I moved through with my 5th movement point?
</blockquote>
<p>
Is it because when I opened the door, and revealed the monsters, the positive effects on Clear the Way ceased to operate?
</p>
<p>
Or is it a bug in the digital version of the game, did it misinterpret the powers of the bottom half of the Clear the Way card?
</p>
<p>
Or was it because I was misunderstanding what it meant to move <b>through</b> a trap, and hence I only moved "through" a trap on my 3rd hex of movement; on my 5th hex of movement I instead moved "into" to a trap, but not "through" it? That is, ending my turn on a trap didn't benefit from the power of the card, but traps in movement hexes 1-4 did. (If that's the case, that was a subtle use of the word "through", a word which is not used anywhere in the "Traps" section of the rulebook, and one that would have benefited from some extra clarity in the card.)
</p>
Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-72351936275228363532023-09-05T07:24:00.001-07:002023-09-05T07:24:29.102-07:00Why is the bridge there?<p>
Oh, you surely must go read this lovely citizen history report about an (apparently) useless pedestrian bridge built in 1959 in suburban Minneapolis, Minnesota: <a href="https://tylervigen.com/the-mystery-of-the-bloomfield-bridge" target="_blank">The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge</a>
</p>
<p>
Come for the initial mystery; stay for the great presentation and lovely old pictures and documents; enjoy the patient dedication of our historian; and celebrate the climax:
</p>
<blockquote>
The best search terms were not road names, they were people's names.
</blockquote>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-9824901711306679722023-09-04T13:54:00.002-07:002023-09-04T13:54:54.275-07:00The World Beneath Their Feet: a very short review<p>
Scott Ellsworth's <a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/scott-ellsworth/the-world-beneath-their-feet/9780316434874/?lens=little-brown" target="_blank">The World Beneath Their Feet</a> was a fun summer read. I suppose I'd call it "sports history", and it indeed has a little of both (sports and history) sprinkled together.
</p>
<p>
Ellsworth picks an approximately 20 year period, from the early 1930's up through 1953, to focus on, and he manages to cover a lot of story telling in a fairly compact 300 or so pages (plus some nice sections of notes and references at the end).
</p>
<p>
The mountaineering parts were fun for me, and drew me to the book in the first place, but to be honest I found some of the history parts more interesting. For example, there was a sizable discussion of how the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany dramatically affected the mountaineering world, as Munich changed from being the gateway to the Alps into being the birthplace of National Socialism.
</p>
<blockquote>
The old Munich was also gone.
<br/><br/>
While waitresses in dirndls still served massive joints of Schweinebraten at the Augustiner, the city that had once charmed visitors as different as Mark Twain and Wassily Kandinsky was no more. It had been swept away by a tidal wave of hate-filled speeches and miliary parades, poison-pen editorials and spit-shined jackboots. It had gone up in smoke and kerosene, in piles of books set ablaze on ancient cobblestone streets, or with the click of a revolver behind a locked jailhouse door. And it had simply vanished, with a pink slip set upon one's desk, the neighbor who no longer said hello, or a knock upon the door in the middle of the night.
</blockquote>
<p>
More interesting to me was the discussion of how mountaineering changed central Asia, specifically the people and communities of places like Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet, Sikkim, Baltistan, Kashmir, and more.
</p>
<blockquote>
Darjeeling had the feel of a way station placed midway between heaven and earth. [...] Founded as a seasonal retreat for colonial administrators and army officers seeking to escape the blazing heat of Indian summers, the British transformed the remote hill station, accessible by a fifty-mile small-gauge railroad, into a slice of home. Cotswold cottages and Tudor mansions sprouted along the hillsides, complete with rose gardens in the back and Wedgwood teapots and soup tureens nestled in mahogany china cabinets. [...] But Darjeeling was a Nepali town as well. When British planters ventured that the lush, dripping, and often cloud-covered hills nearby might be a good place to grow tea, they hit the jackpot. [...] And as the word leaked out among the Sherpa communities in Nepal that good wages could be earned by lugging heavy boxes and daypacks up the slopes of the Himalayas for the British, the Germans, and others, members of the Sherpa enclave on the backside of Darjeeling began to utter quiet prayers in the smoky air of a nearby Buddhist monastery and keep their ears peeled for news of another expedition.
</blockquote>
<p>
And a particularly important contribution of the book is to help tell the story of how the end of Colonalism eventually changed the relationships between the British and their former subjects, and how mountaineering in particular helped to accelerate that change.
</p>
<blockquote>
The underlying issues, of course, went much deeper. And nobody knew that quite as well as Tenzing. "With the Swiss and the French I had been treated as a comrade, and equal, in a way that is not possible for the British," he said. The Raj was gone, and the Empire was soon to follow. [...] Both Hillary and Tenzing had been keeping their eyes out for a potential climbing partner, and they were impressed by what they observed in each other. [...] Tenzing later recalled, "What was important was that, as we climbed together and became used to each other, we were becoming a strong and confident team." [...] Later, in camp, Hillary told some of the other climbers, "Without Tenzing I would have been finished today."
</blockquote>
<p>
Back and forth the book meanders, roughly chronologically, interspersing rousing tales of mountain adventures with interludes of social and political change (as well as some technological change). Ellsworth is effective in this technique, keeping multiple story lines afloat and never wandering too far from his core characters, the hundred or so extreme adventurers who obsessively returned to the mountains again and again to try to reach the top.
</p>
<p>
I particularly enjoyed two selections of old photographs, some of them nearly a hundred years old, which helped bring life to the stories. Don't miss the wonderful picture of Tenzing and Hillary from June 6, 1953, just eight days after reaching the summit of Everest! However, some of the pictures worked better than others. I thought the pictures of the Sherpas, Baltis, and other mountain dwellers were far more interesting than the pictures of wealthy British expeditioneers. And the picture of Leni Riefenstahl posed on a slope in the Alps seemed entirely gratuitious, as <i>The World Beneath Their Feet</i> found almost nothing to say about her beyond a single one-sentence reference to a "sultry, twenty-four-year-old former dancer".
</p>
<p>
Though I didn't learn very much new from <i>The World Beneath Their Feet</i>, I enjoyed many of the stories of these adventuresome days, and recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the early days of climbing in the Himalayas.
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-86204160507349989342023-09-02T11:29:00.002-07:002023-09-02T11:29:49.882-07:00A lovely interview with Vishy Anand<p>
Anand always was my favorite player, even though I grew up in the age of Fischer. Fischer got me interested in chess, but Anand got me to love chess.
</p>
<p>
Anyway, <a href="https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/vishy-anand/" target="_blank">here's a lovely interview with him</a> talking to Tyler Cowen, the brilliant economist (and polymath).
</p>
<p>
Watch the video or just read the transcript; either way it's great!
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-70557535126534971702023-08-30T14:58:00.001-07:002023-08-30T14:58:33.577-07:00There is no shortage of fascinating things to read about Rust<p>
For example, here's <a href="https://fasterthanli.me/tags/rust" target="_blank">FasterThanLime's collection of Rust articles</a>!
</p>
<p>
The world of Rust grows and grows. I feel like I did in 1996, when I was just discovering Java, and every day seemed to bring something new to learn.
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-82568073142150178772023-08-24T17:20:00.000-07:002023-08-24T17:20:12.362-07:00A year in a day<p>
As they say, when it rains, it pours: <a href="https://www.sfgate.com/california-parks/article/death-valley-photos-show-storm-destruction-18328988.php" target="_blank">Photos reveal destruction of Death Valley roads after historic storm</a>
</p>
<blockquote>
After a year’s worth of rain fell in a single day, photos shared by the National Park Service reveal the level of destruction that the tail end of Tropical Storm Hilary wreaked on Death Valley.
<br/>
<br/>
The 2.2 inches of rain that swept through the driest swath of land in America on Sunday ripped up pavement on nearly every road, sent debris down rivers that appeared in the sand and compromised four utility systems.
</blockquote>
<p>
I love the picture of them trying to use a snowplow to move the water off the road.
</p>
<p>
When all you have is a hammer...
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-83660258799775460122023-08-18T08:17:00.001-07:002023-08-18T08:17:52.677-07:00Hurricane Hilary forecast<p>
Wow <a href="https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_ep4+shtml/145329.shtml?rainqpf#contents" target="_blank">this</a> is an unusual forecast to see!
</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrqeqQKTju7bVcPe38yiFputb5jthqxT6KsAjCF3NKEk6unKoQl5MK51w8WHKGAjE3oGJSFJA8DvwW46nxpvIBKPFtkEdtoHk5VHzXmSJ8_F1TSJMaulFaDReQ2hQpqeGeAy43Zu9Nobi9zVZkC9RNRm7IyqmBST8YtuaNTc3CPQfhVu5NiHF3wk_khopx/s1882/Screenshot%202023-08-18%20at%208.14.01%20AM.png" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="600" data-original-height="1522" data-original-width="1882" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrqeqQKTju7bVcPe38yiFputb5jthqxT6KsAjCF3NKEk6unKoQl5MK51w8WHKGAjE3oGJSFJA8DvwW46nxpvIBKPFtkEdtoHk5VHzXmSJ8_F1TSJMaulFaDReQ2hQpqeGeAy43Zu9Nobi9zVZkC9RNRm7IyqmBST8YtuaNTc3CPQfhVu5NiHF3wk_khopx/s600/Screenshot%202023-08-18%20at%208.14.01%20AM.png"/></a></div>
<p>
Possibility of 6 inches of rain in the Mojave Desert in a single week!
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-20120317735459394742023-08-13T09:07:00.000-07:002023-08-13T09:07:19.548-07:00To the Puzzles Editor of the New York Times, ...<p>
Dear Puzzles Editor of the New York Times,
</p>
<p>
I wish to draw your attention to the "All or One" puzzle in the August 6, 2023 edition of the newspaper.
</p>
<p>
The puzzle rules are:
</p>
<blockquote>
Place a digit from 1 to 3 in each cell so that each outlined region contains either all the same digit or all different digits. If two cells are separated by a bold region boundary, they must contain different digits.
</blockquote>
<p>
Here is the puzzle solution, from the August 13, 2023 edition of the newspaper.
</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj73HRh3RFb5BuFtFXSng9wl8EBCF11ooDFFHqv28LXfuzf3S1HGTRu7k7jJFHsO3aVZjysSqim44ntJfapCL8V8wPFJOeXruFrGucFZT75VclI9ky-zzCjGfMF0K_6_XLHzzvsuLjmmLlM46ew6h4CTBNMr0w004X_Rr--pASec_yRSTM_SFkCq8GfXRdZ/s1440/Photo%20on%208-13-23%20at%208.57%20AM.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; "><img alt="" border="0" width="600" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1440" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj73HRh3RFb5BuFtFXSng9wl8EBCF11ooDFFHqv28LXfuzf3S1HGTRu7k7jJFHsO3aVZjysSqim44ntJfapCL8V8wPFJOeXruFrGucFZT75VclI9ky-zzCjGfMF0K_6_XLHzzvsuLjmmLlM46ew6h4CTBNMr0w004X_Rr--pASec_yRSTM_SFkCq8GfXRdZ/s600/Photo%20on%208-13-23%20at%208.57%20AM.jpg"/></a></div>
<p>
Please note that the cells at Row 3, Column 2, and Row 4, Column 2 (as numbered from the top-left corner of the puzzle) both contain the number "2", yet they are separated by a bold region boundary.
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<p>
Bzzzzt!
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Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7545863793559798918.post-9035285727445967242023-08-12T12:05:00.000-07:002023-08-12T12:05:04.476-07:00Young Adam: a very short review<p>
Can a book be both horrible and yet also magnificent?
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I don't know, somehow it seems that the horrible must be strictly separate from the magnificent, and there can be no overlap.
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But if you accept that the concept is at least plausible, then surely <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Young-Adam-Novel-Alexander-Trocchi/dp/0802126170" target="_blank">Alexander Trocchi's <i>Young Adam</i></a> is such a book.
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<p>
Trocchi was Scottish, but he spent most of his literary life in Paris and New York, simultaneously celebrated and controversial. Much of his work, including an early version of what became <i>Young Adam</i>, was published under pen names, as it was deemed vulgar, even pornographic.
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<p>
But <i>Young Adam</i> is certainly not pornography; it is something else entirely. Written entirely in the first person, it tells the story of a short period of a few months in the life of Joe Taylor. Joe is a laborer, but not a tailor; most of the book involves a temporary job he has taken working in a coal barge which is delivering a load on the River Clyde.
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Things happen, not exactly <b>to</b> Joe, but also not exactly <b>apart</b> from Joe either, and those events, together with Joe's thoughts about them and reactions to them, fills the pages of this short book in a blurry, dreamlike, feverish way.
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The things that happen are terrible, dreadful, vile things, and yet to Joe they are just the course of life, and his descriptions of how things seem is vivid but yet also distant and gauzy, as though everything is real and fantasy all at once. Here's Joe talking about what it's like to wake up in a bunk on a bed:
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<blockquote>
The slow lick of the water against the belly of the barge was still present when I awoke, as though during the night it had guarded the connection between states of waking and sleeping, the noise of the water only, for my cabin had changed under the pale log of light which entered at the port, defining clearly the greyness of the blanket, the chipped varnish of the plank walls which closed me in. Often when I woke up I had the feeling that I was in a coffin and each time that happened I recognized the falseness to fact of the thought a moment later, for one could never be visually aware of being enclosed on all sides by coffin walls. As soon as one saw the walls, as soon as light entered one would no longer be cut off and so the finality of the coffin would have disintegrated. And then I would be conscious again of the sound of the water and of the almost imperceptible movement of the barge in relation to it.
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How masterful this paragraph is!
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I can't stop admiring the exquisite skill with which Trocchi delivers this. At the start of the paragraph, we are sound asleep, having some sort of strange sensual dream about being our belly being licked by the water, being caught between life and death ("waking and sleeping"), frozen in an underworld vision. But it's not a happy dream! Joe dreams he is "guarded" from some "connection", and the horror of this dream is vivid and gripping: Joe is certain he is dead and yet somehow experiencing life from within his coffin. Even as he is waking up, he is still having nightmares: the light itself becomes a fantasy creature of some sort with its own agency; it is a "pale log" which has "entered". Then suddenly Joe is awake, and he realizes he was just having a dream, and now the "finality of the coffin" has disintegrated. At first he thinks it's the light itself which has done this, but then he understands that all of his senses are involved: "the sound of the water", the "movement of the barge", even the feel of the blanket on his bed is part of this blurry transition from the dreamworld to the real.
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Joe sees the world through a strange and demented perspective, and yet in Trocchi's masterly handling you find yourself inhabiting Joe's mind, sifting through the perceptions he makes as he passes through life, having psychotic breaks that burst open and then vanish as quickly as the rest of us might take a breath or scratch an itch. Just simply doing his crew-work on the boat is a strobe-lit sequence of ghastly visions:
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<blockquote>
Up on deck the air was cool, cool grey, and over behind the sheds the brick factory stack was enveloped in a stagnant mushroom of its own yellow smoke. Leslie spat out over the side of the barge and put away his pipe.
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I'll start her up, then," he said, and went below again.
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I let go of the ropes and soon we had moved out into the yellow flank of the river into midstream and were heading for the entrance to the canal. The water was smooth and scum-laden and it seemed to lean against us and fall again, the surface broken with scum-spittles, as we made way. Now and again a piece of pockmarked cork moved past low in the water. There wasn't much traffic on the river. And then, under the dirty lens of sky, Leslie was looking intently towards the quay from which we had just pulled away, marking in his memory, I suppose, the stretch of water from which we had pulled the woman's corpse.
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Now, it is boring when you get used to it to crawl along a canal, to wait for a lock to open, for water to level, but you see some interesting things too, like the cyclists on the footpaths where a canal runs through a town, and kids playing and courting couples. You see a lot of them, especially after dusk, and in the quiet places. They are in the quiet places where there is no footpath and where they have had to climb a fence to get to. Perhaps it is the water that attracts them as much as the seclusion, add of course the danger. In summer they are as thick as midges, and you hear their laughter occasionally toward evening where the broken flowers spread down the bank and touch the water, trailing flowers. You seldom see them: just voices.
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Wow! How do you even start to comprehend this section? We start out in a "cool grey" industrial catastrophe, with smokestacks and sheds and a "stagnant mushroom". We can't really tell if this is really the docks by the river or captain Leslie's pipe. The odd repetitions of language ("into the ... flank ... into midstream", "lean ... and fall again") set up a metronymic rhythm that begins to thrum within us. There "wasn't much traffic", but the otherwise peaceful departure of the barge from his moorings then startlingly veers wildly from "smooth" to "scum-laden", with its "scum-spittles" and "pockmarked cork". And then, suddenly, out of the blue (or, rather, out of the "dirty lens of sky"), suddenly "the woman's corpse" is there in Joe's mind. And then, immediately gone again, for we're back to being "boring" as we "crawl along" and "wait ... for water to level". How much more boring can things be? It's like watching paint try. There are "footpaths" and "kids playing", and you "get used to it", emphasized by the rhythmic repetition of the "quiet places". And then, suddenly once more, "the danger"! With shock you realize that although there is "laughter" and "courting" and "flowers", we have crossed some horrible, horrible boundary (we "have had to climb a fence to get to" it!), and these are "broken" flowers telling you about the real "danger" in these quiet places.
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<p>
Oh you simple-minded reader, who thinks that the peaceful riverside is a place of peace and happiness, what little you know of the demons in Joe Taylor's mind, and what he sees in this pastoral sweetness.
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<p>
Near the end of the book, Joe goes on a tirade, ranting about the injustice of it all, watching the criminal justice system condemn an innocent man. But in fact it is Joe himself who has done this, and here he stands in for Mr. Everyman, blaming the "system" for faults that in the end trace back to individuals.
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<blockquote>
The social syllogism in which Goon had been unfortunate enough to get himself involved upset me deeply. If any act of mine could have destroyed that syllogism, I should have acted gladly. Go to the police? Confess? In practice I knew it would prove fatal to me. In principle it would have been in an indirect but very fundamental way to affirm the validity of the particular social structure I wished to deny.
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Ah yes, practice and principle. Messy subjects. Joe's rationalization infuriates us and yet barely surprises us, having spent 150 pages deeply inhabiting his mind.
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Reading <i>Young Adam</i> is a funny experience, for if you are as me you feel compelled to race along, to keep up with Joe's feverish descent into madness, to go there with him and experience it all unfold. And yet, it is all so vivid, and so bitterly and dreadfully immediate, with that "what's around the next corner" feeling, that you want to take the book as slowly as possible, and drink in every horrifying phrase and description.
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If you ask me whether you should read this book or not, I don't really know what to tell you.
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It was a deeply moving experience for me.
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But you must make your own decision.
</p>Bryan Pendletonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01020254358854104453noreply@blogger.com0