Coyote Blog

Folks in the OWS neighborhood in NYC are fed up and want the city to kick out the protesters.  While they grow old waiting for that, I would suggest taking some individual action right out of the army psi-ops manual (actually, its also from a Sopranos episode).

1. Find some big-ass speakers
2. Find the biggest amp you can
3. Place speakers in window, point out at park.
4. Find the single most annoying recording you can, and play it at volume 11 .. over and over and over and over, day in and day out.  I might try "I'm turning Japanese" or maybe "I want a hippopotamus for Christmas."  Possibly the song they used to play over and over in FAO Schwartz stores, or "It's a small world."   Or maybe something like a Joel Osteen sermon.  It almost doesn't matter once its been repeated 12 times an hour for 3 days.

An interesting story about the background of the real "Sybil," and how much of her personality problems were the result of aggressive third parties trying to make their career -- totally unsusprising to anyone who has studies the great child abuse / day care hysteria and JaneyReno's Miami method.  A very brief excerpt:

Mason, like so many patients diagnosed with multiple personality disorder (now rechristened “dissociative identity disorder,” in part to shake the bad rep of MPD), improved markedly under certain conditions — namely, the absence of her therapist. For several years after her therapy concluded, she lived happily as an art teacher at a community college, even owning her own house. But the publication of “Sybil” destroyed that life; Schreiber, who had invented so much of her biography, had so thinly disguised other details that many acquaintances recognized her. Too self-conscious to endure this exposure, Mason fled back to Wilbur and lived out the rest of her life as a sort of beloved retainer, cooking her doctor breakfast and dinner every day and nursing her on her deathbed.

Wilbur, on the other hand, thrived, presiding over the explosion of MPD diagnoses as one of the foremost experts on the condition. She played a key role in promoting the belief that conspiracies of fiendish, sadistic adults were secretly perpetrating murder, child rape and mutilation, human sacrifice, and cannibalism across the country and that repressed memories of such atrocities lay at the root of most MPDs. Innocent people were convicted of these crimes on the basis of testimony elicited from highly suggestible small children and hypnotized adults. Families were sundered by therapists who convinced their patients that they’d suffered similar ordeals despite having no conscious memory of it. This opened the door to years of expensive and ineffective therapy.

This Reason cover spurred me to watch a movie I had wanted to see for a while called "Man on Wire" about Philippe Petit, who snuck up to the top of the World Trade Center, strung a line between the buildings, and tight-rope walked 110 stories up.  It is a great story, and you get to see a man who is a true eccentric, not to mention being either fearless or totally nuts.   He is exactly the kind of person with an eccentric but harmless passion who tends to be crushed by an ever-more intrusive state.

By the way, the movie is also a homage to the WTC, including a lot of construction footage and skyscraper porn.

Seen recently in an airport, but unfortunately I have been to so many I can't remember which one.  Sacramento, maybe?

Today in history, Neal Armstrong botched his lines in front of an audience of a billion people.  The line was supposed to be "One small step for A man, one giant leap for mankind."  Makes a lot more sense that way, but to most ears he dropped the A in front of "man" and ask any school kid to recite it, and they will usually say it without the A.  I'll cut the guy some slack, he did everything else pretty well and he had a few distractions.

For some reason I do not fully understand, there are two worlds of gaming - the Wal-Mart/Target/Toys R Us world of Monopoly and Risk, and the geeky world of strategic gaming.

It used to be that the strategic gaming world was just too complicated and arcane for prime time.  I once spent a whole summer playing through a game called "War in Europe" from SPI.  It had a 42-square foot map of Europe, thousands and thousands of counters, hundreds of pages of instructions, and simulated WWII in weekly turns.

However, there is now a whole slew of games in the strategic arena, mostly from Europe, that are very accessible.   A number are not much harder to learn than Risk but are more fun and play a lot faster.  Unfortunately, few of these have migrated to mainstream stores, so you may be missing them.  Here are a few my family plays that are excellent places to start.  I have put them in approximate order of complexity, from low to high.

[By the way, don't have a family or friends?  Your in luck!  At least 3 of the games below have very high quality iPad game apps with good to very good AI competitors]

1. Ticket to Ride. Very easy to learn.  Even visiting kids get the idea immediately.  This is a railroad line building game.  Start with the original North American version, it is the least complicated.  Also, if you have an iPad, there is a very good game app port of this game.
2. Small World. This is an absolute freaking classic. Totally fun, pretty easy to learn, fast to play.  Sort of a wargame ala Risk but it doesn't feel like Risk.  Very repayable because the army or race (e.g. dwarves, elves, giants, etc) you play changes each game as special powers are mixed and matched.  As important to taking territories will be recognizing when your race has become senescent and when it is time to start a new race.  If you have an iPad, there is an awesome Small World game app I heartily recommend.
3. 7 Wonders. A new game that has quickly become a favorite.    This game is typical of many modern strategy games -- there are many ways to score and you only have a limited number of actions, so the trick is figuring out your priorities.  The play rules of this game are dead simple.  The complicated part is deciding what action to take among many alternatives, since the scoring is complicated.  Here is my advice on this game and for many of these games that follow.  Just play the game once.   This is what my kids and I did with 7 Wonders.  They yelled at me at scoring time that they hadn't understood that such and such scored so well or poorly, but they understood it better with one play-through than by any number of times parsing the rules.  This is our current favorite.  Interesting dynamic here as after each card play, everyone passes his or her whole hand to their neighbor.
4. Dominion.  Similar to 7 Wonders in that it is a card game building to victory points.  There is a constant tradeoff of getting victory points now or building up "infrastructure" that will allow more scoring later.  It is more complex than 7 wonders as it has even more options and paths.  I play it with my family but both this and the next game fall out of what are typically called "family" games.
5. Race for the Galaxy.  Again, similar to 7 Wonders and Dominion, just more complicated.  A planet development game.

Here are some other family accessible games I can't recommend as much

1. Settlers of Catan. This is a popular strategy classic, and is simple to learn.  My kids think its kind of meh.  It has a diplomacy negotiating element that does not seem to work well in my family for games
2. Cargo Noir. I have only played this once, so I can't say how it wears.  My kids liked it better than I did.  It is easy to learn, but I thought the strategic options were a bit thin.
3. Carcasonne.  There are very few games I don't care for, but I have tried this game several times and it just does not click for me.  But it is wildly popular, so what do I know?  A game where you add tiles of roads and cities to try to score based one where you have put your mini people (meeple in euro-game speak).   There is a high quality port of this game on iPad.

Here are some games I really love but are not appropriate for the entry level family

1. Twilight Struggle - replay the cold war.  My son and I played this and it was awesome, but it took some time to learn and was pretty wonky.
2. Agricola - one of the reigning kings of hard-core Euro-style strategy games, this game is fairly complicated to learn (not helped by instructions that really need a re-write) and very complicated to master.   The concept -- trying to keep a medieval family alive - bored the hell out of my kids but it is similar to many of the games above in that there are far more ways to score than one can pursue in a turn, and it has a very strong element of balancing immediate returns against investments in the future.   I have never played Puerto Rico but my sense it is in a similar genre.

The Boardgame Geek website is a great place to learn about these games (I have just listed a few of the most popular of literally thousands of games).  Their ranking of top family games is here.  To give you an idea, Monopoly is rates #781 in family games and #7148 overall by their readers (though there is some geek snob factor in this, it really is not a very good game), so you probably have some good games to discover.

PS- Most all of these are on Amazon.

Courtesy of the Doublethink blog, comes something really, really wrong.  A cross between My Little Pony and Serenity.  Eek.

Cheerleaders

This morning, I got stung by this little f*cker in the shower

I have been stung by fire ants and bees and wasps but nothing hurt as much as this sting.  Right now, my entire foot is pins and needles (not numb, but the painful feeling when your circulation returns) and the toe that got stung really aches.  I also have other weird symptoms like dry mouth.  I also have pins and needles on my tongue and everything I eat or drink tastes funny.

I am lucky -- my wife got numbness and pins and needs all the way up her thigh from a sting on the foot, and she didn't regain full use of her leg for three days.

I know I will get commenters encouraging a call to poison control.  We have called before.  There is nothing to do short of just gutting it out  (unless one goes into shock, where there is an anti-venom but there are downsides to using it).

Update: The pins and needles have moved halfway up my calf.  This reminds me of those adventure stories (e.g. Lonesome Dove) where one of the characters has gangrene moving up his leg and there is great suspense as to whether they will get to a doctor in time before it reaches his torso.

Update #2:  The tingling is up to my knee now (remember, the sting was in my little toe).  My whole mouth has that acidic taste, like biting on aluminum foil, and my vision is a bit jumpy.  Given the trivial volume of venom that I received, this is nasty stuff.

Update #3: Up to mid-thigh now.   My teeth have pins and needles too.  Is that even possible?

Update #4: Walking is interesting.  Think of the worst pins and needles you ever had after regaining circulation, and how it hurt to move that limb at first, and that is what walking feels like.  It's odd to me that a toxin can mimic the exact same feeling as that of circulation returning.  I suppose some medical type might be able to explain this.  By the way, though it does freaking hurt, I am trying to treat this with levity because I know it will go away eventually.   I don't want to insult people who deal with true disabilities or chronic pain by whining too much.

Update #5: My hands now have pins and needles too.

Update #6: Its now 10 hours after the fact.  My entire leg is still all pins and needles but the pain at the spot where the sting occurred is greatly reduced.  My hands still are both tingling and my eyesight is still jumpy

Final Update: When I woke up Saturday morning, I felt vastly better.  However, I still had tingling in my stung foot as well as both hands.  The tingling finally went away entirely about 30 hours after the sting.  Unlike other kinds of bites or stings, once the tingling went away, there is no after effect of any pain or even itching.  I was lucky -- my wife's arm remained numb and tingling for three days after she got stung on the wrist.

Connoisseur

As read by Samuel L Jackson (hat tip Radley Balko)  Warning:  R-rated language.

I don't write about the Middle East much because its a big muddle that requires a lot more knowledge than I have to comment on seriously.

I will say this about Israel, though:  I too would love to see better civil rights performance at times (just as I would like to see better performance from our own damn country) but it's interesting to hypothesize what the US would do in similar circumstances.  After watching our post-9/11 Constitutional rollback, I wonder what other extreme steps we would be taking if, say, Mexican rockets routinely landed in San Diego or Nogales or El Paso.  One does not have to go too far out on a limb to call the Israeli response "restrained," at least in comparison to what the US would do in parallel circumstances.  Not to mention our reaction if a major foreign leader came to our country and urged us to give back the Gadsden Purchase as a solution.

... people can seek out some pretty amazing spaces to do business.  Not sure OSHA would be hip to this.

Via Carpe Diem
Update: Substituted a video I thought was better.

Here is a rare look at my native habitat, a micro-ecosystem that has mostly been extinguished in the heartless march of human progress.  Where was the Nature Conservancy when you needed them?

Rules of golf modified for war.

I wanted to share my build report on my new home theater speakers.  I built three matching speakers - left, center, right - to go behind my acoustically perforated projection screen.   Because they stay behind the screen, this is perhaps the last time they will ever be seen.  But I wanted to get better at wood-working skills, so I tried to build these as if they were to be visible (but at several steps I could have taken shortcuts which I will describe).

Here are the finished product:

I will put the rest below the fold so as not to bore those not interested.  My apologizes to feed readers, but I think you will see the whole thing.

Continue reading ‘Speaker Build Report’ »

My speakers (L-C-R for a home theater) are complete!  They sound fine on the initial test, though they need to break in for many hours.  Here is how they look (the paint job is actually truck bed liner).  I will post a complete build report when I can get caught up.

Woman waits in line for 41 hours to be first in line for the new iPad, then sells spot in line for $900 which she uses to buy Lady Gaga tickets.

Don't get me wrong - this is not meant to be some conservative rant against the vacuity of the younger generation.  It just strikes me as hitting a really interesting pop culture nexus.

Who knew that this was the key question to ask on a first date.

The simplicity / complexity question is also interesting as a predictor of political views.  I prefer simplicity but apparently must subconsciously seek complexity because that is what I seem to get.  Does that make me libertarian?  A libertarian would argue that both liberals and conservatives act, at least in the political arena, from a deep hatred of complexity, or at least unpredictability.  You can't really love capitalism without being able to accept chaos  (chaos in the sense of "unpredictable, bottom-up, unregulated and uncontrolled," not the more nihilistic Road Warrior connotation).

I thought this map in the National Geographic was cool- it shows the most popular surname in different areas of the country.  I am not sure what geographic divisions they use (why does Texas have so little granularity?).  But it does turn out there are a couple of "Meyer" labels on the chart, which kind of surprised me  -- though they did spell it the right damn way - no "s" on the end, no Mayer, no Myer or other such nonsense ;=)

The "Meyer" in the middle of Iowa is pretty much where my dad's family settled when they came over from Northern Germany.  Though I am confused as to why they show it color-coded as English origin -- I am pretty sure this area is German  (the Meyer over around northern Nebraska and in Wisconsin is coded German).

HT:  Flowing Data

My 16-year-old took the car into the shop today and had his first experience dealing with the repair guy.  I told him that they may call him and tell him he needs some work done on the car, like they will say he needs to have the flux capacitor flushed for $300, and if he was in doubt, call me.  He said fine, but if they tried to sell him laser canons, he was going for it.

I love maps like this one, and a year or two ago I linked an earlier version.  This one is from the Economist via Carpe Diem, and shows the name of the country whose GDP is similar in size to that of the state.

I have to criticize the map-maker, though.  They used Thailand at least four times on this map -- the original version managed to do it without repeats.  But I am amazed that Arizona ranks right there with Thailand.  This is not to diss the rest of the state, which has a lot going for it, but in terms of population and economic activity, a huge percentage in in just one city, Phoenix.

I do have to wonder whether New Mexico being matched up with "Angola" is really very flattering, and pairing Mississippi with Bangladesh is funny on a couple of levels.

Jesse Walker

If you've ever gone browsing in an occult bookstore (and you really should; it's like browsing in a science fiction bookstore, only the authors really believe the stories they're writing, or pretend to)...

I am in the process of building some speakers for my home theater.  This is something I have never done before, but the idea has always intrigued me.  So much so I have actually played around with software and designed a lot of cabinets and crossovers, but never built them.  I am finally going to build an L-C-R for my home theater, and since they go behind my projection screen (the screen is perforated for sound transmission, just like in movie theaters) the pressure to produce flawless cabinetry is reduced significantly.  In fact they will probably be built out of raw MDF finished in black, though I will try to make them look nice just for the practice.

Anyway, one of the reasons I have put off this endeavor is that I do not own a some of the key tools, and do not have the space for these tools.  I have a nice router, belt sander, jig saw, etc.  but I do not have, and really don't have the space for, either a table saw or a drill press.

Which led me to wonder if folks had well-outfitted workshops that they lease out by the hour for such work.  After all, with a good plan in hand, I probably don't need more than an hour on a table saw to get what I need -- most of the project will be in routing the speaker holes and counter sinks, assembly, and sanding/finishing which I can do at home.

Of course, I could not find such a thing.  I could not even find a storage locker that would let me use it as a work shop.  Thinking about this, I am not surprised.   No matter what I get a customer to sign, now matter how well maintained the tools, if someone cuts their hand off using a tool in a stupid and careless way, there is likely going to be a jury somewhere that still wants to assign me liability.

My readers tend to be very nice about rushing to help -- I got about 10 emails offering to help me with my server migrations.  I turned them down because part of the point was to learn to do it myself, and my learning process tends to be by trial and error doing things myself.  Anyway, please do not offer me your shop -- I have found a local community college that allows its shop to be used after one has completed a training and familiarization course (which seems a reasonable precaution).

I am excited about getting started, and am just starting to accumulate the materials.  BTW, in case it becomes relevant to you in the future, a full 4x8 sheet of 3/4-inch MDF is really heavy.

Postscript: I will let you in on my secret ambition.  I really, really want to build a pair of line arrays, as much for their shear bad-ass looks as anything else.  Of course, my wife would freak and I am not sure where they would go in my house, but someday....

OK, I have to call bullsh*t on a certain cultural phenomenon.  At the risk of uttering a blasphemy, I have to say that In and Out Burger is simply not very good.  It seems to be hot among teens, so I get dragged to it from time to time by my kids, but the burgers are just meh and the fries are simply bad.  Among fast food joints, Wendy's is much better and we have a veritable explosion of gourmet burger places here in Phoenix  (a trend I applaud as mightily as I did the craft beer phenomenon) that are all much better.  As a regional phenomenon that builds a cult following as it spreads east, it reminds me of nothing so much as the similar Coors beer craze in the 70's, where easterners used to illegally carry Coors over state lines to bring some back home (e.g. Smokey and the Bandit).  And Coors sucks too.