Lift Up Your Hearts!

Meet Feudal Effort, the latest addition to the comics list on my Sursum Corda page:

 I find it fun.  Sometimes there's a bit of mildly objectionable language, but nothing the nephews can't handle, and I don't think the grandkids are reading my comic list yet.  :)

You can get to know the characters here.

Is there a word, in any language, for "my daughter's husband's cousin's husband"?  That's what Kevin Michael Johnson is, and I'm proud to claim the family relationship, however distant and awkwardly-phrased.  Kevin is an actor, living in New York City with his lovely singer-songwriter wife, Steph Shaw.  One of his recent triumphs was in the show Wild Black Yonder, which a number of members of our family (but, alas, not I) were privileged to see at "The Kate" in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.

Kevin's latest venture is The Raid, a documentary about the tremendously popular online game, World of Warcraft.  Everything I know about WOW I learned form the Foxtrot comic strip...at least until I watched Kevin's promotional video.  The embedded video below is from YouTube, but the link will take you to a video on the official, more informative site, where you can also get involved in the project if it excites you.  You can also check them out on Facebook.

Forget whatever witty and informative post I was going to provide tonight.  Go over to The Occasional CEO and read about the latest and greatest economic forecasting tool:  Just Follow the Bones.

Nanosurf—the company that put an atomic force microscope on Mars and good Swiss bread on Janet's table—has a cool promotional video.

Today's Stone Soup says it all.  Far from being boring, the people I know who are not active on Facebook are choosing instead to live their First Lives.  :)

Thirty years ago we entered the world of adventure gaming.  We had graduated by that point, so I believe it was my brother who first hooked us up to the University of Rochester's computer system, on which was installed ADVENT, the one, the true, the original computer adventure game—running on a DEC-10, I'm pretty sure, though my memory is misty on the details.  After ADVENT we moved on to the original Zork, which was just as much fun.  No devotee of today's high-action, graphic-heavy, semi-realistic games will ever understand the delight of those simple, text-based games.  (The links will take you to Wikipedia's description of the games, but I'd avoid them if you ever think you might play them yourself.  The ADVENT—Adventure—entry especially gives too much away.  And if you're wondering why the name was ADVENT rather than Adventure in those days...believe it or not, it's because "Adventure" has too many letters.

What was truly wonderful about the games was the social interaction.  One of my favorite memories is of the houseful of relatives who had come to share Thanksgiving with us.  We had a borrowed terminal and the old-fashioned type of modem—new technology then—into which one fitted the telephone handset after dialing in and hearing the carrier tone.  We took turns typing commands into the computer, and everyone participated in solving the puzzles, each person contributing his own special knowledge and way of thinking.  The idea of "cooperative games" leaves a bad taste in my mouth, being associated with the misguided self-esteem movement in public schools some years ago, but these, truly, were cooperative games, in which we all won and to which everyone had something to contribute.

The game went on well into the night—that is to say early morning—though we were not all of us fully conscious the whole time.  I, for one, had a month-old daughter to tend, and retreated upstairs for whatever sleep I could get, though I stumbled back downstairs with her every time she awoke to nurse.  My father, too, tended to fall asleep, though he chose to doze in the living room chair with the game going on around him.  This rarely hampered his puzzle-solving abilities.  During one game (this may have been during the Zork years), the crew was stuck on this riddle:  What's tall as a house, round as a cup, and all the king's horses can't draw it up?  Dad was asleep, and they didn't want to disturb him, but they'd grown desperate.  This was well before the days when one could google the answer to nearly everything.  So they shook him gently, and when he showed signs of consciousness asked him the riddle.  Immediately he responded with the correct answer, and went back to sleep.  In some ways life was more fun before Google. 

On the other hand, it was through Google that I discovered that the original (or close to it) ADVENT and Zork are available to play online!  (Along with many other classic games, some good, some decidedly not.)  I'm not exactly recommending them, as even a brief trip down memory lane sucked up more time than I can afford, at least for solitary play.  Worse, the "save/restore game" feature doesn't seem to work.  That may be the fault of my computer settings, but I'm not working to solve the problem because it leads me away from temptation.  Other than that, however, ADVENT is all I remember—I haven't tried Zork yet—and I highly recommend it as a party game for a group of three to eight people.  On the condition, that is, that they agree not to resort to the Internet for hints and puzzle answers.  The joy is in the process; rushing to the end only subverts and diminishes the fun.

One more thing, which I hesitatingly offer to those who have absolutely no time for computer games but welcome language study:  There's a German version of ADVENT.  And a Spanish one, too.

My favorite section of the newsletter we get from Wycliffe Bible Translators is where they give some interesting example of the challenges of accurate translation.  The "back translation"—translating back into English something that had been translated from Engilsh to the new language—often reveals subtleties and misunderstandings that can be quite funny.

As it turns out, one doesn't need to be documenting a rare, unwritten language to find translation humor.  Our new printer came with the following warning:

This product is supplied with a plug that has a protective earth pin.  This plug will fit only into an earthed electrical outlet. This is a safety feature.  To avoid risk of electric shock, contact your electrician to replace the electrical outlet if you are unable to insert the plug into it. Never use an earthed adapter plug to connect the product to an electrical outlet that lacks an earth connection terminal.

Too much politics lately.   Time for something lighter.

Here's what looks like a Japanese game show where the contestants must wake up, get ready for school, and be out the door in less than five minutes.  That's just a guess—the only words I understood after "three, two, one, go!" were "bento" and "sandwich."  I love it for the reminders of Japan, and for the really cool lunch the mother makes for her child to take to school.  Note the Japanese way of quick shirt-folding.  Can any of my Japanese-speaking readers (all one and a half of you) tell me what on earth she is doing with the shirt? And why that would be part of a normal morning routine?

I never did understand brushing one's teeth before eating, though.

Hat tip to Andy Bonner for this humorous look at the copyright mess.

My sister called me a geek because I adorned reserved church pews with such labels as "DSTB 1" and "NMB 2."  To me, that was a compliment, but I still maintain I'm too old to be a geek.  Nonetheless, I was pleased to note that I scored higher than expected on Geek Dad's 100 Essential Skills for Geeks.

1. Properly secure a wireless router.  I can't count this one, as Porter has always done it for our systems.  But I could have figured it out and done it if necessary.
2. Crack the WEP key on a wireless router.
3. Leech Wifi from your neighbor.  Not for long, but I did occasionally back in the day when most people didn't bother to secure their routers and before there were air cards.
4. Screw with Wifi leeches.
5. Setup and use a VPN.
6. Work from home or a coffee shop as effectively as you do at the office.  My home is my office, so this is a given.  I'm not so comfortable with coffee shops, though I've done it.  If I were a real geek, maybe I wouldn't be so paranoid about security.  Or maybe I'd be more.
7. Wire your own home with Ethernet cable.  Porter did this.  I could have done the geek part, but I'm not so sure about the crawling-around-in-tight-spaces-in-the-attic part.
8. Turn a web camera into security camera.
9. Use your 3G phone as a Wi-Fi access point.
10. Understand what “There’s no Place Like 127.0.0.1” means.
11. Identify key-loggers.
12. Properly connect a TV, Tivo, XBox, Wii, and Apple TV so they all work together with the one remote.  Wouldn't want to.  :)
13. Program a universal remote.  Not high on my priority list, but I think I did it once.
14. Swap out the battery on your iPod/iPhone.  Hmm, this skill must be more difficult than it is on my non-i phone.
15. Benchmark Your Computer
16. Identify all computer components on sight.  Probably not.  But I bet I could identify some 1970's computer components that many modern geeks can't.
17. Know which parts to order from NewEgg.com, and how to assemble them into a working PC.
18. Troubleshoot any computer/gadget problem, over the phone.  Nope.  Few things are more frustrating.  I'm not bad if the other person has the same system, version, and set-up as I do, but does that ever happen?
19. Use any piece of technology intuitively, without instruction or prior knowledge.  I do like to play with things and figure them out without reading the manual first—more so now that mistakes only break my computer, not someone else's—but I want a real manual, not a booklet that's only more than a couple of pages by virtue of saying the same thing in 10 languates, and not a .pdf that I can't read until I've already installed the system.
20. How to irrecoverably protect data.
21. Recover data from a dead hard drive.
22. Share a printer between a Mac and a PC on a network.
23. Install a Linux distribution. (Hint: Ubuntu 9.04 is easier than installing Windows)
24. Remove a virus from a computer.  I don't ever want to have an opportunity to learn this skill.
25. Dual (or more) boot a computer.
26. Boot a computer off a thumb drive.
27. Boot a computer off a network drive.
28. Replace or repair a laptop keyboard.
29. Run more than two monitors on a single computer.  Aw, shucks.  When I first read this, I thought it said "two monitors," not "more than two."
30. Successfully disassemble and reassemble a laptop.  Never done that, but I know a completely non-geeky, blonde musician who replaced her laptop's hard drive using a screwdriver and tech support from India.  This is the origin of our family's "O as in Nancy" reference, that being a phrase said tech support used when giving her a key necessary for installing the drivers.
31. Know at least 10 software easter eggs off the top of your head.
32. Bypass a computer password on all major operating systems. Windows, Mac, Linux
33. Carrying a computer cleaning arsenal on your USB drive.
34. Bypass content filters on public computers.
35. Protect your privacy when using a public computer.  If there's more to this than clearing the cache and browsing history, and closing the browser, I don't know it—which is one reason why I avoid public computers when possible.
36. Surf the web anonymously from home.
37. Buy a domain, configure bind, apache, MySQL, php, and Wordpress without Googling a how-to.
38. Basic *nix command shell knowledge with the ability to edit and save a file with vi.
39. Create a web site using vi.
40. Transcode a DVD to play on a portable device.
41. Hide a file in an image using steganography.
42. Knowing the answer to life, the universe and everything.  Clever, though I didn't realize it until I added "42" to the list of numbers I could say "yes" to.
43. Share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple computers without a KVM switch.
44. Google obscure facts in under 3 searches. Bonus point if you can use I Feel Lucky.  I never use I Feel Lucky, but I am apparently better than most at finding what I want with Google.
45. Build amazing structures with LEGO and invent a compelling back story for the creation.  Too old for the LEGO questions.  Do Tinker Toys count?
46. Understand that it is LEGO, not Lego, Legos, or Lego’s.  Of course it's not Lego's.  Even geeks should punctuate correctly!
47. Build a two story house out of LEGO, in monochrome, with a balcony.
48. Construct a costume for you or your kid out of scraps, duct tape, paper mâché, and imagination.  This was SOP when I was growing up.
49. Be able to pick a lock.
50. Determine the combination of a Master combination padlock in under 10 minutes.
51. Assemble IKEA furniture without looking at the instructions. Bonus point if you don’t have to backtrack.  Would you believe I've never been in an IKEA store, as far as I remember?  There's one around here somewhere, but too far away for me to look for it without a compelling reason, and I HATE SHOPPING FOR FURNITURE.
52. Use a digital SLR in full manual mode.
53. Do cool things to Altoids tins.
54. Be able to construct paper craft versions of space ships.
55. Origami! Bonus point for duct tape origami. (Ductigami)  I have done some origami in my time, but when John Montroll is your standard, you don't claim to do origami unless you've made it all the way through one of his books, and I haven't—even though we own at least 15 of them.
56. Fix anything with duct tape, chewing gum and wire.  Does it count that on a high-school trip to Europe I fixed my camera with string and glue?
57. Knowing how to avoid being eaten by a grue. I've been eaten by one many a time, but finally succeeded in avoiding being lunch.
58. Know what a grue is.  Doggone.  I looked it up once, but as with many things I look up once, the definition currently eludes me.
59. Understand where XYZZY came from, and have used it.  Oh, the memories.  My first computer game ever, and still my favorite, despite its simplicity.
60. Play any SNES game on your computer through an emulator.
61. Burn the rope.
62. Know the Konami code, and where to use it.
63. Whistle, hum, or play on an iPhone, the Cantina song.  Many times, though not on the iPhone.
64. Learning to play the theme songs to the kids favorite TV shows.  I can sing "It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" and most of the songs from The Pirates of Penzance, which pretty much exhausts my kids' "favorite TV shows."
65. Solve a Rubik’s Cube.  Now that my five-year-old grandson can do better than me at this, maybe I'll resort to looking it up online.
66. Calculate THAC0.
67. Know the difference between skills and traits.
68. Explain special relativity in terms an eight-year-old can grasp.
69. Recite pi to 10 places or more.  Piece of cookie.
70. Be able to calculate tip and split the check, all in your head.  This is why I don't go out to eat without Porter.  I can do it, but I like to leave the restaurant before midnight.
71. Explain that the colours in a rainbow are roygbiv.  That's geeky?  I thought that was normal.  Geeky is "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain."
72. Understand the electromagnetic spectrum - xray, uv, visible, infrared, microwave, radio.  Once upon a time...though "understand" is perhaps too broad a term.
73. Know the difference between radiation and radioactive contamination.  Radiation is what I was soaking up at the beach yesterday.  Radioactive contamination is what I was hoping was not present at the nearby nuclear submarine facility.
74. Understand basic electronics components like resistors, capacitors, inductors and transistors.  At one time I could have told you a lot about them, and even recited a rude mnemonic for remembering the resistor color code.  But I never could remember whether "bad" meant black or brown.
75. Solder a circuit while bottle feeding an infant. (lead free solder please.)  Illegal question.  What's that infant doing with a bottle?  This is merely a cover-up for the fact that approximately 50% of the potential geek population would be eliminated if the skill were "Solder a circuit while nursing an infant."
76. The meaning of technical acronyms.  I know many TLA's, but not nearly enough to qualify.
77. The coffee dash, blindfolded (or blurry eyed). Coffee <brew> [cream] [sugar]. In under a minute.
78. Build a fighting robot.
79. Program a fighting robot.
80. Build a failsafe into a fighting robot so it doesn’t kill you.
81. Be able to trace the Fellowship’s journey on a map of Middle Earth.  Despite my poor memory for such details, I could probably do it.  Having read the books a couple of dozen times can make anything stick.
82. Know all the names of the Dwarves in The Hobbit.  To my embarrassment, I could only come up with nine of thirteen off the top of my head.  The rest would come with time, however.
83. Understand the difference between a comic book and a graphic novel.  I can do this thanks to Groshlink.  Prior to reading Tom's post I thought graphic novels were something to be avoided, like graphic violence.  I still think they're something to be avoided, but for different reasons.
84. Know where your towel is and why it is important.
85. Re-enact the parrot sketch.
86. Know the words to The Lumberjack Song.
87. Reciting key scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  I've never seen any Monty Python movie, so that probably disqualifies me completely.  But I can nonetheless recite, "Bring out your dead!"
88. Be able to recite at least one Geek Movie word for word.
89. Know what the 8th Chevron does on a Stargate and how much power is required to get a lock.
90. Be able to explain why it’s important that Han shot first.  I did not know this, but having looked it up, it is, indeed, critically important that Han shot first.  I am exceedingly disappointed in George Lucas for caving in to—what? Political Correctness?  I don't know how to name it—and with one seemingly minor change removing the depth and moral evolution of Han Solo's character.
91. Know why it is just wrong for Luke and Leia to kiss.  It doesn't take a geek to know this, merely someone who sees all kissing in sexual terms.
92. [Rude item removed.  See the original if you care.]
93. The ability to name actors, characters and plotlines from the majority of sci-fi movies produced since 1968.  I guess this assumes one has actually seen the majority of sci-fi movies produced since 1968.
94. Cite Mythbusters when debunking a myth or urban legend.
95. Sleep with a Cricket bat next to your bed.
96. Have a documented plan on what to do during a zombie or robot uprising.
97. Identify evil alternate universe versions of friends, family, co-workers or self.
98. Be able to convince TSA that the electronic parts you are carrying are really not a threat to passengers.  No, but I've had to convince a tollbooth attendant that the dollar coin was legal tender in the United States.
99. Talk about things that aren’t tech related.  Sure, as long as they're related to education, childrearing, genealogy, conservationist living, and whatever else I talk about on this blog.  Oh, you mean actual, physical conversation?  Hmmm....
100. Get something on the front page of Digg.  In my dreams.  Or nightmares, I haven't decided which.

To prove the Front Porch Republic isn't all academic discussions of too much length and intensity for the casual reader, check out Animals Were Definitely Harmed in the Production of this Story, explaining why, unlike modern movies, farm life entails "‘the harming of animals of every shape and in every fashion."

The story is less morbid than amusing, and rings true to life outside of Hollywood.  Here are a few excerpts to tempt you.

Maria and the girls had met a couple driving an old Amish buggy and wearing an odd mixture of Amish and Scottish garb (the broad brimmed hat, no buttons on the shirt, the kilt, the tartan, the whole nine yards).

Fortunately, even a dead horse’s head is extraordinarily hard to separate from its body (it does happen in the Godfather, but they don’t show how it’s done and it’s a movie after all)....

The whole area seemed to be populated by folks with a special appreciation for Jack Russell terriers, and these dogs were fairly efficient cat murderers, but they also proved to be a special delicacy for the local coyote population who, I can only suppose, used them as a solid kind of aperitif. I never saw a coyote, but we often heard them. Our neighbors lost not only Jack Russells but small calves to them as well. They never bothered our chickens, which must have been a matter of luck more than skill, because our beagle/basset hound would have proven to be merely a meatier version of the Jack Russell for the coyotes, and our golden retriever would have welcomed their company.

We kept the chickens for their eggs, so we never actually killed any of them ourselves. On occasion, however, the chickens were happy to kill each other. They loved the scent or taste of blood and pecked each other mercilessly, especially after drawing blood. My wife discovered that allowing the chickens to roam where they desired cured them, for the most part, of their chickocidal tendencies. Free range chickens are healthier not merely because they are "born free, free as the wind blows," but because they are no longer tempted to cannibalize their oh-so-close neighbors.

[I]t turns out that baby birds, like all other animals, sometimes go to sleep, and, that when they go to sleep, they can appear to be deceased, at least when inspected by greenhorns like me.

The lituus is not a test to determine the pH of a substance, although that's how I read it at first.  It's a musical instrument, and one of the last works written for it was J. S. Bach's O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht.  No modern listener has been able to hear Bach's motet as it was intended, however, because the instrument fell out of favor and became extinct.  No one today knows what it looked or sounded like. 

Until now.  Alistair Braden and Murray Campbell, from the University of Edinburgh, at the request of—ta da!—the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, applied to the problem software they had designed to improve modern brass instruments.

SCB gave the Edinburgh team their expert thoughts on what the Lituus may have been like in terms of the notes it produced, its tonal quality and how it might have been played....They also provided cross-section diagrams of instruments they believed to be similar to the Lituus.

"The software used this data to design an elegant, usable instrument with the required acoustic and tonal qualities," says Professor Campbell.  "The key was to ensure that the design we generated would not only sound right but look right as well."  He added: "Crucially, the final design produced by the software could have been made by a manufacturer in Bach's time without too much difficulty."

Using ths design, the Schola built two of instruments, which were then used in a performance of O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht earlier this year.  I urge you to read the entire BBC article, or at least click through to it so you can listen to a sample of the music.  It's not the best of all samples, and the performers had almost no time before the concert to practice this completely unknown and difficult instrument, but it will give you an idea of what may be to come.

It is an unwieldy instrument with a limited tonal range that is hard to play. But played well, it gives Johann Sebastian Bach's motet a haunting feel that couldn't be reproduced by modern instruments.

In case the link to the article breaks, as such links are wont to do, here is a picture of the instruments.  Those of you who attended a certain joyous celebration in Basel may recognize the other performer as one member of the alta capella band that led us from the church to the reception.

Wolfram|Alpha is in its infancy, and like any baby it can be quite cute.  Like this example Janet discovered while trying to figure out how much powdered (confectioner's) sugar is in a box.

For every presidential election in recent history (meaning at least the last 30), I have had one overriding concern:  the nomination of Supreme Court justices.  I was asked once why it would be a problem if President Obama merely replaces retiring liberal justices with more liberals—other than missing the opportunity to "pack" the court to my liking.  That's when I realized that I don't want a biased Supreme Court, at least not in the sense my friend was implying.  But neither do I want a "balanced" Supreme Court.  I want one that will rule based on the Constitution, whether they are for or against me.  I don't want the Judiciary taking over the role of the Legislature.  If our Justices are chosen based on their positions on particular issues rather than for their position vis–à–vis the Constitution and the Law, I think we have little hope for real justice.

But enough heavy thinking!  Mallard Fillmore can make me smile, even about such an important issue.

As if Wolfram|Alpha weren't enough to lure me away from productive work, Phil (not the Phil who comments here) posts this news story.

You get the picture.

(Oh, Janet—look what happens when you lure your mother to the computer for a phone call and then go out for the evening!  )