Powers of Four

I took a bunch of pics at the zoo a few weeks ago, and I’ve slowly been flickring them. I’m really, really pleased with how some of them turned out. Others, less so. But I think I’ve done a good job of selecting my favorites to put on Flickr.

I’m driving to San Diego tomorrow to spend a month and a half down there. My SciPy talk got accepted, too, so I’m going to be giving a talk in Pasadena in mid-August.

I won’t talk too much about the new movie. It draws pretty clearly from The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, both of which are awesome, but it is — above all else — original. And awesome.

I think my feelings on the situation were summed up by a very brief conversation I had with one of the other people that I saw it with.

Other: I don’t know. I didn’t like it. I just can’t see a car explode, or see somebody die, without thinking about the families and the life that was extinguished.
Me: I think … that’s the point of this movie.

This movie isn’t The Incredibles, which I found objectionable because of the careless disregard for human life shown by the heroes. This movie takes every life taken seriously, and portrays (much like The Dark Knight Returns with its oh-so-memorable Cub Scout ice cream pull-back) Batman’s unwillingness to take a life as being just as important and potentially damaging an ethical dilemma as Joker’s eagerness to do the same. There’s one key scene with the Joker, which I won’t reveal here, that involves the muttering of what is possibly the most important lines in the film, that just gave me chills.

So yeah, two thumbs up for an amazing film. My recommendation: see it, see Hellboy II, and avoid anything coming out of Marvel Studios.

Congratulations to A&J! 9 pounds?! 21 inches?! OUTSTANDING.

(I was pushing for them to name the little one “SuperNintendo.” Mission: Unsuccessful!)

I subscribed to Doughty’s blog a while back. The latest entry is really good — just some casual musings on where he is, what he’s doing, and the idea of breakups in the particular type of social environment we all occupy nowadays.

That’s a line from a Mike Keneally song, “I Can’t Stop” from the album “hat.” (The period is part of the title.) I once got the occasion to chat with Mike, and I asked him, what’s the deal with that line? What’s the answer? Do you? He told me, sometimes — but sometimes you can’t do that to yourself. Once you write it down, turn it into a song, it becomes something else; when you sing it, you’re performing, you’re not really creating in the same way. You can’t put yourself there every time.

I sat down to write a blog entry that expressed a bit of my frustration at not-quite-running-into someone from my past on the street near my apartment. I saw her, and I occasionally do see her, although usually she does not see me. (Perhaps this happens the other way, too, and I am blissfully unaware.) As I walked back to my apartment, a bit shaken, all I could think was — and this was due to the context in which I saw her — I was just an interloper in her life. And I think maybe that’s true of so many people I’ve known.

Just an interloper, passing through, without any real right to be there.

I wonder if I’ll remember how I felt, if I ever read this again. I kind of hope not.

I was planning on blogging about how much I am not looking forward to a talk I am to give next week. But maybe I won’t, now.

Roger Ebert writes great essays.  This one, short and vulnerable, is the best one I have ever read.

I love science.

This is a visualization using the VTK bindings I wrote this weekend with JS. I had to hack the VTK source and expose a bunch of object, fix some bugs in vtkHierarchicalBoxDataSet, and then fix some interpolation issues in yt (interpolating to the vertices was not precisely correct; I fixed it, although I still thinking about it — just not so hard) and it was done. I’ve added a bunch of convenience functions to a couple python files in my sandbox SVN, but they are not ready yet to be integrated into the main trunk of yt. Hopefully soon. I’m also going to explore pushing the VTK patches upstream, but I have no real feel for how well-received they’ll be.

This entire project was vastly simplified by the use of the TVTK bindings from the folks at Enthought. There’s some pretty great software coming out of Austin…

Incidentally, this is a star I made.

Pterry has been quoted numerous times lately saying he has “found God.” Turns out, not quite. I think the viewpoint he expresses is one of great interest, and one that certainly does come across in several of his books.

I never thought my coding style was particularly terse. However, this is a conversation I had today:

SS: DC and I were trying to decipher some of your code in yt - you gotta put in more comments! We’re not all geniuses like you.
Me: I’m not a genius. I think I am just a demented coder.
SS: I don’t know if you looked at my merge stuff, but I think we’re kind of polar opposites.
SS: I’m pretty verbose, you’re like a stone.

(I genuinely do mean the deflection; I think I really am just a coder that has a particular outlook that is not always in line with everyone else.) Perhaps this should be a wake-up call — if I expect other people to use my code for scientific analysis, I need to provide them with an entry point not just for how to get it to do something, but also an entry point for understanding how it gets that result. Perhaps this will end up being the hardest set of documentation I have to write.