Dr. Memnus Lagbane Soultooth the Mad

There's something about the sky after an evening snowstorm. The clouds linger low, lit from below by city lights and above by a full moon, and somehow it's nothing like the nights I got so used to in Claremont. Maybe it's the cleanness of the air and ground, before the snow has had a chance to get dirty and everything is still white. Maybe it's the mountains so close, rising up against the clouds. Maybe I just feel different this year. Whatever it is, it's about damn time we got some snow.

In honor of my perpetual boredom and neglect of aerobic exercise, I walked down to GameStop to look for a dance pad. Computer gamers take note: a "universal" connector includes Playstation, X-Box, and Wii. Note a distinct lack of USB qua USB - although an X-Box plug is the same pins in different plastic, and Nintendo may well be, no appropriate converter is included in GameStop's store brand pad. Even worse, the store in question doesn't carry anything from Ignition.

They did, however, have Wiis in stock.

No, I didn't get one. I was prepared to spend a certain amount for the reasons listed, but not six times that much. If I get a job next semester, I'll revisit that decision. There's a couple possibilities on the table, two jobs that have about as little to do with each other as penguins and pandas. Disappointingly, they're utterly incompatible.

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I'm going to be off the grid for a while.

My family on my mom's side has their giant reunion at Thanksgiving every year, in Virginia Beach. I'm still making up for missing for of those in a row - not to mention forming impressions of the gathering as more of a grownup than a teenager - so that's where I'll be Thursday.

But! I am also maintaining a long-distance relationship with a lover in southern California, and any long weekend is an excuse to snag some Frances time. So I will head there as well!

The end result, five flights in five days (SLC-ATL, ATL-ORF, ORF-CVG, CVG-LAX, LAX-SLC). It'll be exciting, and give me plenty of time to grade midterms. Will it be worth it?

Hell yeah.

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Man convicted for sex with bicycle (BBC News)

The headline would grab anyone's attention. The charge, "sexually aggravated breach of the peace by conducting himself in a disorderly manner and simulating sex," makes it sound like he was in the middle of the street at the time, which would be a different matter entirely. This turns out to be far from the case.

The act itself doesn't faze me. I've learned well that people do some bizarre stuff with their genitals. No, what weirds me out and makes this entirely fucked up is that this "breach of the peace" was performed in the man's own bedroom, behind a locked door. And for it, this gentleman has been placed on a sex offenders registry for three years.

Three years. For fucking his own bicycle, in his own locked bedroom. The hell???

(In the interest of fairness, this was a bedroom at a hostel. There may be rules in place at hostels regarding what is and isn't private space, but somehow I suspect that if the cleaners had walked in on him with another consenting adult, there would have been nothing more than a few blushes and a quickly closed door. Feel free to correct my assumptions here.)

Sex offenders registries help no one, when the innocent bicycle fetishist and the high school senior that happened to turn 18 before his high-school-senior girlfriend are lumped in with the serial stalkers and baby-rapists. That's a big gap, here, but two years from now nobody's going to look at this guy and see a guy caught in an embarrassing, but harmless situation. No, they'll see a sex offender, and treat him accordingly.

Sense of perspective, anyone?

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Now using a perceptual model of color vision, with the deficiency introduced in the red-green opposing signal.

( Two more images, also small )

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Frances was here and gone. Rocky's half done. I have a week left in this house until I have to move, and simply have not started packing (though the aforementioned Frances took away some kitchen stuff I won't need). This would be the perfect time for a power cycle and reset ... would that I could do that on command.

I'd like to take a moment to be grateful for my instinctive sense of balance, that stays with me even when drunk. As I was jumping around on stage last night, the (five-inch) heel on my left boot broke, hanging on by just a flap of pleather. I managed to hang on through the scene and the credits, but now it's got superglue splashed into it and I don't know if I can trust it.

I vaguely want something mindless to do. NWN2 would take too much thought, I'd rather not play DMC3 on the keyboard again, and I beat Half-Life. Currently working on downloading Half-Life 2, but it's huge. I do want to see what Skylark can do with it, though.

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This journal is five years old today. Yey.

And what a five years it's been. Seriously, the hell?

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I'd like your thoughts on a problem. (Here, all "randomly chosen" numbers are taken from the same continuous real distribution.) Suppose you have a set S of n randomly-chosen numbers, and a set D, initially empty. Begin by removing the largest number from S and placing it in D, and adding another random number to S. Now take the largest number from S that is smaller than the last number you chose, place it in D, and replace it with a random number. Repeat until you've taken the smallest number from S.

- What is the distribution of numbers in D?
- What is the expected value for the size of D?
- Bonus question (I know the answer to this one!): Why is Brian thinking about this problem?

I'm about to start in on a Monte Carlo estimator of the problem, but I'd like some theoretical input.

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While it's nice to be able to (legitimately!) play Half-Life 2 on lab computers, it'd be even nicer to be able to do so without getting motion sick.

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Inspired by Tales from the Pit.

( ... )

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( Hot poly ass action )

Elbows and knees are even weirder!

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