aka bolson

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Redistricting, with racial demographics
I've updated my impartial automatic redistricting site to include the racial breakdown of all current congressional districts (sometimes interesting by itself) and that of the compactness based districts I have come up with. If you want you can jump directly to http://bolson.org/dist/XX where XX is any US state abbreviation to see what's up for a state you're interested in.

silly human tricks
what we did last night:

edit: also on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG3Kv5Rdufk (3:16 mostly of people stumbling around setting up and maybe getting the formation for a second, maybe you had to be there)

Zealotry of the newly Fit
I've been having a lot of fun with my increasing fitness lately in climbing and acro-gymnastics. This new good feeling has on occasion turned my my thoughts towards those of the newly converted zealot: "wow, this is awesome, this is clearly better, everyone should do this"
This may be partially true, but for the other part I should probably try to not be a jerk about it.

. . . . .

and I don't have to look very far to see examples that make me think humbly that I have a lot more improvement yet I could do.

the 25 minutes of fireworks were pretty neat, but I should have staked out a place with a good view two hours earlier, and the crushing mob of zillions of people was unfun.
broadcasting the tv announcers is still lame.
some of the music was lame too.
but the fireworks were neat.

Good unplanned day.
Hacking: Yesterday and today I've replaced 700+ lines of annoying crufty perl in my redisticter with much nicer Python.
Stretching: Days are frequently better when I have time and remember to do 20 minutes of basic stretches and exercises.
Biking: Quiet streets with very little traffic, and sunny and cheerful day. Biking home with an extra 40 pounds of groceries was noticeably slower and more work though.
Still no plans for tonight. If I don't hear of a better offer maybe I'll just go wander the human zoo down by the Charles.

a moment in the woods
excellent weekend. tired now. cameraless, I hope people who took pictures of me will send them to me later.

Love and office politics
I don't get them...
sum of love equals what? sum of office equals what?

purchasing decisions
I've been mulling over getting a $900 chair for the home office for months. It would be a good, durable thing that would give me many years of improved sitting. Monday Apple upgraded the MacBooks and within a couple hours I placed an order. It should be here next week wednesday, and have a useful-to-me lifespan of 2-3 years. (Current laptop to be retired at 2.7 years.) I think this must have something to say about how I am more comfortable thinking about technology than furniture.

Word choice
Apparently at some point I started assuming I was done learning the English language. I think I'm pretty well educated and have a pretty good grasp of the language as it is used these days. Now at least half the time I hear a word I don't know I question the judgement of the user of that word. Are they trying to sound uppity by using an obscure word? Why can't they use something more plain so that they'd be more widely understood? Does that obscure word really have anything that the common ones don't?

Culture Shock/Dating Fail/Lazy Saturday
8 days ago friday night I was having an excellent time dancing with a beautiful-intelligent-sexy young woman, the kind of flirty dancing that I took to have intent to follow through, and so I suggested that I should take her out on a date some time and she said that sounded like a nice idea. I had given her my phone number and email address and she had texted me and I had texted her (I would have much rather emailed, more writing space, better UI, but I didn't have her email) and I think I was waiting for her to email me. Last night I discovered she was waiting for me to call her. It never occurred to me to use my phone to contact her at her phone number for voice communications. I just do do that. So I spent about the next two hours of the dance just kind of dumfounded in shock that my brain had not processed something so basic, that yet still felt so strange to me. She said she had something to do Saturday, so maybe I'll call Sunday and see about scheduling something for next week/weekend. ... if I'm not still too dumb and foolish feeling to be able to make a serious go of it.

Now I have a totally unscheduled Saturday, and even before last night's shock I was feeling a great ennui towards today. It probably means I need more rest after a hard work week, so I will try to really rest until I figure out if there's something I really want to do.

Ok, I totally buried the lead before, but I'm actually really excited about
my new web toy ComicChopShop.com

I've been working on it in hobby time for months and I finally got it ready enough to flip the switch and show the world. That was last night at about 2am.
The premise is that given templated art for comic characters and a format where you can have one or two characters in a comic pane talking, you should be able to pretty quickly make some interesting things. There's a kinda small cast right now, and with a bit of a political bent and I should add more to branch out, but I think there's enough to get stated.
I'd love it if any of you who think that sounds kinda interesting would go give it a peek, and maybe the muse won't strike you right away, but if the inkling hits you in a day or two or a week come on back and really try it out.

I kinda feel bad for the Microsoft recruiter who found me. She really did her homework and must have spent a few minutes reading my website beyond the resume. She even found the email me page and noted the part where I don't want to receive any microsoft formats. So I wrote her a nice note back saying how nice it was of her to send her email and that yes, I don't use any microsoft products and that would probably make working there awkward. Oh well, better luck next time, intrepid recruiter.

Something got me thinking about alternate histories, and the alternate history where I went to MIT instead of CMU. I would have gone, but I didn't get in*, and I track back from that to High School Calculus where I got a C when I clearly could have gotten an A (got a 5 on the AP test). The teacher didn't like how I did my homework. I didn't "show my work". This was a chronic problem for me in math classes at least as far back 7th grade. I was smart and good at math and the problems were too easy, too trivial, so I did them in my head and wrote down the answer. Teachers nagged me to write down the intermediate steps but I thought that was stupid and a waste of time, and I got enough right answers on homeworks and tests that I cruised through anyway. Finally I got to calculus and a teacher who insisted that writing down the intermediate steps was an integral part of the answer and took off points on the homework and tests if it wasn't there. I fought this. I probably complained that her standards were vague, unjust and stupid. I handed in homework done my way. Right final answer, nothing else. She took off points. I started to yield a little, it wasn't enough and she took off points. First semester grade, junior year, C.

I wish one of those teachers or someone had told me something like this, which I would say to my past self now:

It's not just about getting the answer. What happens when you come across a new problem? One for which there isn't an answer in the back of some book? How will you know if you have the right answer?

Then, even if you're sure, how will I know? I may be older and slower and dumber than you, but I or someone else may be in a position of authority to decide whether your answer or someone else's answer is one that will be put into effect. You have to show to me that your answer is right and make be believe it. It may be stupid and it may be a waste of time, but it's not just about getting the answer for yourself but also getting it so that other people can get it.

Maybe someone did tell me that, or parts of it, and I was still to young and brash to hear it. Anyway, best not to dwell too much on might-have-been, but maybe this story can help a future math whiz.

--
* Only barely got into CMU too. Got in off waitlist. But these things are as capricious as the flight of a butterfly. I got over that. After a brief time there of wanting to make sure I proved good enough, I became pretty sure I was good enough.

Dollhouse
Lying around sick for the last day and a half I didn't want to be particularly active and watching TV seemed about my level of engagement. I watched all of Dollhouse. There were definitely some good moments in there. The action and characters were compelling enough to get me through it.
And now, to geek out on some points...
( rambling on themes and plots )
"I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats", but isn't everything?

I bought a fever thermometer last week. This was clearly tempting fate to give me something to measure with it. The damn thing appears to have broken on its first use. It's stuck reading 100.4F/38C and there's a little gap in the not-mercury. The bulb of stuff has retracted and left behind a nonsense reading. Grrr.
I'm contemplating trying to carefully raise its temperature to 101F and see if I can achieve stuff-reunification. Maybe it's just doomed.

two years' trend
weight log for the last two years

Of course there are also other changes this simple number doesn't show.

I saw the Star Trek
( click not if you want to see movie untainted by my talking about it )
Anyway, it does have a lot of Trekkiness, which does delight. In summary, it was just OK or moderately good. Other reasonable people could easily watch it and like it and not be annoyed at what I was annoyed at.

A variation on the vanity Google search for your own name, do a Google Image Search on your own name. I recently became the top hit for my own full name on regular search, and I've been in the first 10 for years, but nothing about me comes up on image search until the 4th page and an actual picture of me doesn't come up until the 6th page.