Blogger just enabled full editing of templates in the new Layout system. It's different from the old Blogger template system. I played with an early version of it, and I like it a lot better. It was pretty easy to come up with a template that made things look pretty. Or that looked like an old "green screen" monitor, which is perhaps even better than looking pretty. Working with one of the starter templates even taught me some neat stuff about CSS. But blogs about blogging are dull. You're here for the book reports. So as long as we're talking about ways to make things look pretty, maybe this is a good time to talk about A Perfect Red, a book about making things pretty.

Specifically, this was a social history of cochineal, a dye made from insects that feed on nopales. Yes, those same nopales that are so nice when marinated and rolled up in a burrito. But in this book, they're called "nopals". I never saw the spelling "nopals" until I read this book. I guess it's the official English spelling, but that no-one uses the official English spelling. That is, when I conduct a Google internet search for [nopales], I get a quarter million results, but no little "define" link letting me know that I can look this word up in an online English dictionary. When I search for [nopals], there are 800 results, but there's a "define" link. I guess more burritophiles need to take more lexicographers out to lunch more often.

What--oh, the book? The book had some interesting stories of industrial espionage and botany as various gringos attempted to smuggle the secret of cochineal out of Mexico. The book also had some long passages describing What the Color Red Meant to the People of the Time. Maybe that's nice if you're into that sort of thing, but I was happy to skim that part.

Tags: books | bug juice | red |

A conversation with my office-mate as I took out my ear-phones:

me: I sure am glad I brought this little audio-recorder dealie along on that treasure hunt game, it made it easy to take good notes.

him: Mm Hmm.

me: But I wish I'd remembered to turn it off when I went to the bathroom.

him: Ugh. I didn't need to hear that.

me: Yeah, see, I concur.

There are some things which are best left unsaid. Which brings me to the book Us and Them.

This book points out that people have an instinct to categorize things; we especially have an instinct to categorize people. This book does go on about that. The introduction mentions the author's belief in the scientific method and experimentation. But the experiment reports are pretty sparse in this book. At least, in the first 100 pages. I gave up on it after that.

Tags: books | blah blah blah | light on substance |

If you've played in bay area puzzle-hunt games, you might have met a sweet dog named Libby. She traveled in the company of Alexandra Dixon, captain of Team Mystic Fish. Libby died on Friday night; she'd had cancer for the last few years. It will be sad not seeing her around.

Today, I'm playtesting the Hogwarts Game. This game is going to be kind of unusual in that Game Control is providing transportation. They warned us not to pack our stepladders, copy machines, coolers, or any other heavy things--because we'd need to carry them all, and we wouldn't always have a van to stow them in.

This begged the question: how much can I carry in a backpack while walking around without getting winded? Can I carry a laptop--and other things at the same time? And so I took some walks around San Francisco carrying a laptop and the book I was reading at the time--a big statistics textbook.

Yes, I read a statistics textbook. At work I find myself dealing with big piles of data. I want tools to help me to understand big piles of data. The statistics that I learned back in high school helps, but I could use more.

The main thing I got from reading Introduction to the Practice of Statistics is the Central Limit Theorem:

The sampling distribution of (the mean of x) is normal if the underlying population itself has a normal distribution. But what happens when the population distribution is not normal? It turns out that as the sample size increases, the distribution of (the mean of x) becomes closer to a normal distribution. This is true no matter what the population distribution may be, as long as the population has a finite standard deviation.

Everyone who's studied statistics is probably rolling their eyes that I pointed out such a basic thing. But trust me, if you haven't been allowing yourself to use many tools because they were only good for normal distributions, and you were stuck, then this is a big deal. Go ahead, roll your eyes at the slow-paced self-taught bozo. I'm happy.

Tags: books | discovery | long since discovered by millions of others |

Must pack. Must pack for Hogwarts playtest. Meanwhile, you can consider this book report for Eight Skilled Gentlement:

It's a novel. It's swashbuckling fun set in a fantasy world based on kinda-historical China. It's fun! It's very silly, full of gruesome horror, sneaking around in secret passages, awesome prophecies disguised as nursery rhymes, and dragon boat races. It's also the third in a series, so you probably want to start with the Bridge of Birds, if you can find it. You can't find it, of course. So you might try for the omnibus Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox.

Tags: books | comedy | false tiger 

Sometimes prices go up. This has happened before and will happen again. This hurts poor people more than it hurts the rich: poor people already spend most of their money. When prices go up, they can't get everything they need. Things get worse. There is unrest. There is war. There may be famine. There may be plague. Eventually, the thing that was causing the worst price pressure eases off. Things head back to normal. But a lot has gone wrong in the meanwhile.

This book has awesome charts. I almost wanted the guy to shut up about the reasons behind past price-hikes because they were distracting me from all of the excellent data. Prices versus time. Population versus plagues. Prices versus population. In an appendix, there is a chart plotting The Price of Donkeys in Roman Egypt, as measured in Egyptian drachme per head. If I were a publisher I would insist that all books from now on contain an appendix with a chart plotting the Price of Donkeys in Roman Egypt.

This book taught me a lot. The next time some free-market fiend tells me "Price controls don't work," now I can cite a time when they did work quite effectively. Must remember. Harry Truman. 1951. Korean War. Also, WWII.

Tags: books | economics | history |

Concrete is a superhero. He can withstand gunfire, climb mountains, lift cars. But what can he do against global overpopulation? Now he teams up with a pizza company executive in a campaign to convince America's youth to choose childlessness. If you're not familiar with Concrete comics, you might not want to start with "The Human Dilemma". You might want to start with the earlier collection "Depths" instead. But eventually, you'll want to pick up The Human Dilemma, because it is awesome.

Tags: comics | Domino's | pro choice |

Well, after those relatively content-free photo posts, I'm sure you're glad to see I'm returning to my mainstay: informative and insightful Book Reports. Here is my Book Report on The Squirrel Mother:

I didn't understand these Megan Kelso comics.

Tags: comic | meow face | WTF meow face? |

How awesome is sailing with friends? Sailing with friends is so awesome that maybe before you set out, you're demonstrating how to work the pump-toilet and the pump-toilet isn't working quite right. In fact, something goes so horribly wrong that a dollop of used toilet water that's been in a tank with other used toilet water can squrit up and, against all odds, hit you in the face and mostly get up your nose. That's not the measure of awesomeness. The measure of awesomeness awesome is that you might get toilet water up your nose, and at the end of the day, you still say, "Wow, what a great day."

Tags: photo | eww! | the end |

Can I claim to be "out on the bay" if I wasn't on a boat? If I was just on a dock? I was at Fort Mason for a game play-test. Beforehand, I went out on a dock, and I was certainly above the bay. I think that counts as "out on the bay" for the purpose of this photo essay. Not that I took this photo on the dock. How could I pass up a chance to show off this photo of Christopher "Design Patterns" Alexander's table by the Fort Mason firehouse? Alexander always wants his spaces to be used by the people. Here we can see that someone is using the table to dry off some pants.

Tags: photo | strained | theme |

On the Hornblower California sunset cruise. That's the sun in the background, washing out a lot of this photo's color, sorry. You can see Fort Mason behind me if you squint into the virtual light.

Tags: photo | nautical | foreshadowed |

On the ferry to Angel Island. I'm holding the camera tilty, sorry. That line of low yellow buildings behind me--that's Fort Mason.

Tags: photo | nautical | foreshadowing |

Saturday, there was a lot of puzzlehuntish activity on the peninsula. I wasn't playing in it. Well, not much. I knew that a bunch of folks were gathering for that PerplexCity hunt--people would run around San Francisco solving clues; others would solve clues on the internet. I didn't especially want to play--the thing revolves around trading cards. I try to avoid activities that involve trading cards. I try to eschew some geeky activities, just so I can remind myself that there are some depths I have not sunk to. Sure, I wander around with a headlamp and a clipboard, but I can still sneer at the trading-card fanatics and curl my lip at the gawddammed furries.

Still, when my breakfast feed-reading on Saturday morning uncovered one of the PerplexCity puzzles, I figured I should try to contact some of the people playing in the game. I'd read about some of the big communities that had cropped up around the trading card game. Maybe I could find contact information for one of them, point them at this puzzle. Or just give them the answer. Solving the puzzle took less than a minute.

"Find a radio. Tune it to the Fahrenheit equivalent of 36.28 Celsius. If the station you're listening to owned a cat, what would be the cat's name?"

Celsius to fahrenheit conversion, Google does that. Look up a radio call sign, Google does that. Oh, it's that "Alice" station. Name of Alice's cat, I knew that, Google confirms it. Boom, boom, boom. Finding contact information for one of the game's players was not so easy. The next item to read in my morning feeds was actually a post from someone announcing that they would attend the San Francisco PerplexCity hunt. I tried posting a comment to the blog item--that would probably send the author an email. But would they check their email? They were traveling to this hunt. So I tried following links, trying to find some place where I could leave a more immediate communication. There was a wiki--which only allowed members to post. And to become a member, you had to contact an administrator. The administrators didn't have obvious contact information. But they encouraged everyone to contact them on IRC. I was on the verge of downloading an IRC client program when I realized I was running late for, you know, the things I actually meant to do on Saturday.

On my way out the door, I was kind of glad I didn't get sucked in. I'd "solved" that "puzzle," but really I'd just followed directions. Were all of the "puzzles" like that?

That evening was BANG 16. I didn't go. Continental Breakfast did. coed astronomy did. Someone from SPIES did. This sounds like more fun than PerplexCity. I read about that in the days afterwards.

Jessica Lambert writes about game paranoia, thinking I have GOT to stop reading Game-related stuff into everything he does. But I swear, Sunday I saw the Game in everything I read. Well, two things. I tend to read a lot about Game things, but I tend to read a lot about other things, too. In theory. In theory it's not all about the Game. And yet. And yet. Laura Lemay forwarded a story about phrase Here be Dragons. That phrase specifically, not hic sunt dracones. And the referenced article is talking about maps, but of course I was thinking about the gaming team. And there's an upcoming Game which says that players should bring, of all things, empty egg cartons. And since then, I've been obsessing: what could a Game possibly ask us to do with something as non-standard, non-uniform as an egg carton? And Andi Watson posts a photo of an egg carton dragon and I'm sitting there muttering "of course, of course we're going to make egg carton dragons!" And a few seconds later I'm shaking my head because, on reflection, this makes no sense at all.

Maybe any hobbyist would have this problem. Heck, both of those articles were about dragons. I'd probably get excited by those articles even if I was a gawdammed furry.

Tags: puzzlehunts | ubiquity | descent into madness |

I typed in three more essays by Curtiss Anderson:

• Magic Island in the Mist The International Exposition on San Francisco's Treasure Island
• Stories from the Island of Nias off the coast of Sumatra
• Only God can Make a Tree, about his father

Tonight is Sleater-Kinney's last concert before they "go on indefinite hiatus." I tried to get tickets, didn't try hard enough. But you know, it's not the end of the world. Each of the Sleaterians may go on to do great things in other contexts. Pancakes still taste good. There are still great comic books coming out, comic books like Girl Genius.

You must buy this comic. Why? Because it contains the line of dialog, "None of that is working! I'm releasing my poisonous sky worms!" And that's one of the good guys. It's all mad science, all the time across an alternate history Europe in a post-war... Oh, why am I trying to explain this when they have a perfectly good Girl Genius website? This comic continues to be awesome.

Tags: comic | jägerkin | big guns |

It's a family drama about new parents making tough choices between family life and career. Ah, it's OK. It has pretty Andi Watson art, which helps a lot.

Tags: comics | kids | art |

This write-up of the recent Midnight Madness game in NYC has the title I never dared to use: Some serious nerd-ass shit.

There are strange things afoot in Toronto, which are perhaps only tangentially related to puzzlehunty things, but which nevertheless serve to remind us that all Canadians are dangerous freaks.

Tags: puzzlehunts | midnight madness | cussing is still funny |

I worked late tonight for no good reason. My deadlines are all self-imposed. I just got a little excited, missed the reasonably-timed buses, caught a late bus back. Mother Nature abetted my bad behavior, displaying a full moon over a rippling San Francisco bay, a nice view for an evening commute. Sometimes I get a little excited. Blame the full moon.

A while back, I read three Tufte books in the space of a couple of weeks. He writes about conveying data through graphics for E-Z analysis. I was bouncing up and down with excitement about charts. I wanted to draw a chart. But I didn't know what data I should try to present. Finally, I chose something gratuitous.

When designing a language like Morse code, how do you choose the encoding? It makes sense to use short symbols to transmit common letters, and long symbols to transmit the rare letters. How well did the designers of International Morse Code achieve this goal?

(The numbers behind this chart are arguably contrived. I say that dashes take three times as long to transmit as dots. But that's only true if you're keying these letters by hand. There are (were?) plenty of telegraph systems that used the same amount of time to transmit "dit" as they did "dah". But that would have been less fun to chart.)

Tags: books | chartjunk | information |

Pete extracted some more Shinteki Decathlon II photos from his camera, and I posted some of them in the write-up.

In other puzzley news, Eric Harshbarger's running a puzzlehunt in Auburn in September. I mostly know of Eric as one of those people whose last name starts with "H" and with personal homepages with higher PageRank than mine. But the guy builds statues out of Lego and comes up with some cool puzzles. So if his PageRank is higher than mine... I think that means the system works as it should.

According to some mail forwarded by Wei-Hwa, Eric Harshbarger designed some of the puzzles for the upcoming Perplexcity live event here in San Francisco. Maybe that's enough to convince me to risk attending an event associated with trading cards. Maybe?

[Updated when Philip Dasler of Austin pointed out that Harshberger is in Auburn, not in Austin as I originally wrote. Yipe.]

If my earlier snarky, whiny post about folks organizing a multi-day puzzle hunt in New Zealand made you think, "Ordinarily, this is just the kind of thing that would interest me, but Larry has talked me out of it," go look again. I posted some recently-arrived-mail from the organizers in which they give some clarification (and gently point out that I am the only person who can't solve their application puzzle :-).

Speaking of snarky, whiny posts:

There is a problem with autobiographical comics. I doubt that I am the first person to point out this problem. The problem is this: Given the list of possible topics for a comic book, the life story of a cartoonist is one of the less interesting. Alison Bechdel is good. Dykes to Watch Out For is a good comic. It is rollicking, packed to the rafters, an addictive soap... None of the characters in that comic is a cartoonist. Alison Bechdel's autobio comic Fun Home, on the other hand, drags. I dodged a lot of Alterative Comic Artist Autobiographies that were stinking up the place several years ago, so I guess I've been lucky overall.

Tags: books | comic | stirring family drama |

Pete came through with some photos, which I sprinkled into the Decathlon II report. Now the truth is revealed: I was carrying a clipboard, rocking a headlamp, and wearing travel pants with zip-off legs zipped off! Yes, I hit the "triple crown" of dorky-looking gamer fashion.

Yes it is the Shinteki Decathlon II report, in which team Underlying Metaphors ("We will not be understood until it is TOO LATE") sweats a lot. Fair warning: there's not much in there about puzzles. There is a lot of kvetching about the heat.

I took a stroll on my way home tonight, walking through Noe Valley. And who did I run into but Fred Crimi, who worked at the same place that I did, uhm, many jobs ago. Ah, Geoworks. The kind of place where you can work and years later when someone posts to a mailing list sarcastically suggesting writing a web browser in assembly language, you say "that's not funny!" Anyhow, Fred and I hadn't seen each other for years, and we were comparing the names of people we both knew. For each of these people, if one of us had seen that person in the previous 12 months, the other had not. With one exception: Andrew Chaikin. Apparently, the world revolves around Andrew Chaikin. Fred sees him around at musician parties. They're both musicians. I see him around at puzzle-gamy things. We're both puzzle-gamists. I don't really know Andrew. From the way Fred talked, I guess that Fred doesn't either. But there's the connection, Andrew Chaikin, lynchpin.

Tags: puzzlehunts | shinteki | perspiration |

I didn't know that people were allowed to think very hard in Santa Barbara, but I may yet be proved wrong.

Tags: puzzlehunts | just kidding santa barbara | jeez you're so touchy |