Author: Don

Not drowning, just waving

Blogging is low priority right now. I’ll be back eventually. Until then, here are a few links.

Mouretsu Pirates is the only current show I’m following. (I’ll eventually watch Sakamichi no Apollon, and I might finish Tsuritama, but it will be a while before I get to either. The soundtrack for the former is worth tracking down.) One advantage space pirates have over their earthbound predecessors: the cuisine is better.

Everyone who ever writes a review needs to pay attention to Steven Greydanus’s thoughts on spoilers. Once Kirika and Mireille are done with the perpetrators of comment spam, I’ll ask them to pay a visit to the bloggers who announced a certain event in the eleventh episode of Katanagatari, sometimes in the titles of their posts as they appeared at Anime Nano.

Eve Tushnet writes about three of my favorite writers: Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes is my favorite of his books, too); John Bellairs (who wrote about shufflies); and, Diana Wynne Jones. (Memo to web designers: Black type on a white background is easy to read. Light grey type on a white background isn’t.)

I don’t do politics here beyond the occasional sarcastic aside. Ace touches on one reason why. Elizabeth Scalia writes about another, related reason.

Winter wear for the physicists among you: emission spectra scarves. (Via Fillyjonk.)

John C. Wright, proponent of Space Princess Science Fiction, reprints his research on the Catwoman Equation.

Although Yellowstone is a superdupervolcano, it doesn’t really pose an immediate, immense threat. There might be enough oomph left for one more VEI8 eruption, but there will be plenty of warning and probably thousands of years before that happens. If you own land in Wyoming, you don’t need to be in a hurry to unload it. The vicinity of Mt. Ranier is far more dangerous. It wouldn’t take a large eruption to generate lahars that would reach Puget Sound. However, the most nightmarish city to live, from a vulcanologist’s point of view, is Naples in Italy. Vesuvius is its best-known neighbor, but it’s only one of three. Update: Let’s not forget Auckland, built on a volcanic field and liable to experience a Parícutin-type episode at any time.

Here are the true lyrics to “O Fortuna.”

(Via Darwin Catholic.)

Girls (mostly) with guns
Girls (mostly) with guns

I’m generally in favor of girls with guns, but this batch could use a few lessons in gun-handling.

The Brickmuppet hasn’t scheduled a trip to Tokyo, has he?

Tonight and tomorrow

In case there is anyone reading who has just logged online after spending the past ten years in suspended animation: Venus will be passing in front of the sun, starting any minute now. There’s plenty of information about the transit here, including links to numerous live streams. You can also follow the event on the Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the Katmai/Novarupta eruption, probably the most violent event on earth in the 20th century. I don’t have time to write about it, but I expect there will be commemorative posts at volcano blogs such as Eruptions. Update: ~5,300 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers per hour.

Update: Open the APOD image in another window to see it at full size, 4096 pixels square.

Memo to …

… the lady in the seat in front of mine at Mass last Sunday: Please choose shirts that extend below the top of your jeans when you go to church, and find pants that rise all the way up to your waist. You have no idea how distracting it was to see that you were wearing thong underwear.

… the bicyclist trying to light a cigarette while riding no-hands in the middle of the street: Idiot.

… the Department of Health and Human Services: I have never had the slightest interest in tobacco. However, whenever you subject me to one of your recent gross-out anti-smoking ads, as happens every single time I watch an episode of Soul Eater on Funimation, I get a powerful urge to buy a carton of cigarettes so I can blow smoke in your faces, you damned hectoring nitwit nannies.

Ping pong balls from heaven

It’s been a noisy evening, and there’s probably more to come. This is a snapshot from my front porch a few minutes ago.

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I loaned my good camera to a colleague whose Nikon is out for repair. Yesterday evening I went to the botanical garden to see if I could get some good close-ups with my cheap go-everywhere toy. Most of the pictures were blurry, but a couple were tolerably sharp, such as the one above.

Sailor Pirates

This was sent to me by a malefactor whom I won’t identify (his name sounds something like “sick puppet”).

Who would the outer senshi be? Haruka and Michiru are a little too obvious, but whom would you pick for Hotaru and Setsuna? Also, is there any guy as dorky as Mamoru, or any girl as annoying as ChibiUsa?

Update for those who have not endured watched Sailor Moon: the pirates and their sailor senshi counterparts have very little in common. Gruier’s hair deliberately imitates Usagi’s, but she is nothing like the stereotypical blonde that Sailor Moon is. Chiaki and Rei are probably the best match: both are black-haired and short-tempered and sometimes wear miko outfits. In each pair, the pirate is the more interesting character.

Still, Sailor Moon is the gold standard for mahou shoujo costumes. I’m always pleased to see pretty girls so attired, even though this is otherwise a crossover that shouldn’t happen.

Just incredible math

Miscellaneous musical notes:

My financial situation has improved from desperate to merely uncomfortable, and I’ve been able to finally make a few purchases that I’ve had in mind for years. For instance, I now have a grand piano. More precisely, I have a mathematical model of a grand piano in my laptop, Modartt’s Pianoteq. It’s no substitute for the real thing, of course, but I don’t have the space for a full-size grand, let alone the cash. Pianoteq sounds pretty good, and it’s much more “alive” than any sample-based instrument I’ve played. Add a pinch of reverb, and it would take a very sensitive ear to tell that it’s not an actual physical piano in a recording. If you have a velocity-sensitive MIDI keyboard handy, download the demo and try it yourself.

Because it’s not based on samples, the software requires surprisingly little disc space. Pianoteq is only 20 megabytes large. In comparison, Synthology’s Ivory II Italian Grand takes 28 gigabytes, and EastWest’s Bösendorfer gobbles 87. (They also need 7200 RPM disc drives, which means they won’t run on my humble laptop, where I need them. ((On top of that, they both require you to by an “iLok” key, a goddam miserable expletive-deleted dongle, and that is a deal-killer. (Q. What is the purpose of digital rights management? A. To punish the legitimate user.) I daresay that these are wonderful instruments, but I ain’t touching them.))) Physical-modeling synths such as Pianoteq do make heavy demands on the processor, but my laptop handles the load easily.

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I’ve been considering finally buying one of the major notation packages, either Finale or Sibelius. I don’t need the full, all-the-bells-and-whistles versions, which is fortunate, because I don’t have the funds. However, the affordable intermediate version of each can be installed on only one computer, which is inconvenient. I think I’ll see how well MuseScore works.

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I see that Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto (did I spell that correctly? Yes) has been licensed. I’m a little surprised. Although I enjoyed the first several episodes, I never did finish watching it, and I don’t recall that it was exceptionally good or particularly popular.

However, it does feature a good Yuki Kajiura opening song.

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Josh, who prefers J.K. Rowling to Margaret Atwood, finds echoes of Kierkegaard in Talking Heads.

Historical notes

32 years ago today, Mt. St. Helens exploded. Stupendous though it was, it was scarecely more than a hiccup compared to the Katmai/Novarupta eruption of 1912 in Alaska, which has fascinated me ever since I came across an article on the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes in a 1918 National Geographic. In anticipation of its centennial next month, the U.S. Geological Survey has published a paper about the eruption and the history of research on it, which can be downloaded here.

Update
Also free to download: Alaska Park Science Journal, Volume 11 Issue 1: Katmai Scientific Studies

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A friend forwarded this picture to me. This is the note that accompanied it:

The 120° panoramic image (and its crop) you see above is titled “Daguerreotype View of Cincinnati” and was captured in 1848 by Porter and Fontayne from Newport, Kentucky. It was created with eight full-plate daguerreotypes and shows a two mile stretch of the Cincinatti waterfront. Codex 99 writes,

The panorama is not only the first photograph of the Cincinnati waterfront but the earliest surviving photo of any American city. It is also the earliest image of inland steamboats, of a railroad terminal and of freed slaves. It may very well be one of the most important American photographs ever taken.

Politics, grammar and velcro

A few recently-spotted items worth quoting:

Being politically correct does not trump being grammatically correct…please fix.

— Dr. J’s Gothic Literature teacher

But these days the wages of sin is boredom.

— Res Studiorum et Ludorum

Well, I could argue that a proper understanding of punk and its inherent rebellion would have everyone becoming a libertarian or principled conservative …

— Mollie Hemingway (in the comments)

The last is from a thread about the “Weirdest Band You Love.” It’s hard to pick the strangest of my many musical enthusiasms, but the Sons of Rayon might be the most obscure. The inventors of velco tap dancing (fiddler/guitarist Kelly Werts glued velcro hooks on the soles and heels of his shoes and danced on a patch of tightly-woven carpet, which was miced, creating sound when his feet left the platform), the Bill Monroe-meets-Robert Fripp trio was active in Wichita for several years around 1980. They released one cassette, No Velcro, which was one of the first items I digitized when I hooked up my computer to the stereo. Here is perhaps their loveliest song, written and sung by banjoist Paul Elwood and featuring Intergalactic Yodeling Champion Randy Erwin, “UFOs Over New Zealand.”

[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/UFOs Over New Zealand.mp3]

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