Also apparently we’re going to be seeing Olivia Wilde in a lot of SFF Movies because apparently (for real spoilers for Cowboys and Aliens and Tron): casting directors look at her face and say “Your like on Earth I ne’er did see”⁴.

What, the movie? Oh, it was entertaining. Had some quite good moments. Ultimately nothing that special.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trochee
2. http://xkcd.com/856/
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dactyl_%28poetry%29
4. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Child’s_Ballads/37

Here are some things I drew, once I had things working (and the code I used to draw each, mostly for my own archival purposes):

for (var i = 0 ; i < 16 ; i++){paper.path(svgPolygon({oX: 200, oY: 200, sides: 3, size: 100, sizeType: "radius", angleAdj: [i*(1/96), "t"], center: "true"})).attr({fill: "rgb("+(255-15*i)+", "+0+", "+(0+15*i)+")", "fill-opacity": 0.1, "stroke-width": 0});}

for (var i = 0 ; i < 20 ; i++){paper.path(svgPolygon({oX: 200, oY: 200, sides: 3, size: 100, sizeType: "radius", angleAdj: [i*(1/60), "t"]})).attr({fill: "blue", "fill-opacity": 0.1, "stroke-width": 0});} (code for blue star only. Orange star made with basically the same code, but by putting a red down on top of a yellow, to get the rich brilliant orange).

Sarkat calls this one "blueberry peppermint".

for (var i = 0 ; i < 27 ; i++){paper.path(svgPolygon({oX: 200, oY: 200, sides: 3, size: 50, sizeType: "radius", angleAdj: [i*(1/27), "t"], center: "false"})).attr({fill: "blue", "fill-opacity": 0.1, "stroke-width": 0});}

for (var i = 0 ; i < 16 ; i++){paper.path(svgPolygon({oX: 200, oY: 200, sides: 4, size: 75, sizeType: "radius", angleAdj: [i*(1/16), "t"], center: "false"})).attr({fill: "hsb("+(i/16)+", 1, 1)", "fill-opacity": 0.1, "stroke-width": 0});}

I made a little page that draws.

The first person I showed it to, a fellow intern, said “Oh, you made a drawing program.” And started trying to draw on it with the mouse. This is funny, because that’s presumably most people’s first inclination about how a drawing program works, but not at all what I want out of a drawing program. I have a good eye for detail, but miserable fine motor control, which means drawing by hand is extremely frustrating (or carving pumpkins by hand, or calligraphy by hand, or any number of handicrafts).

But I adore programs in which I can draw with numbers, like Adobe Illustrator; I can tell a point to be at exactly 211, 100 and to go from there in a straight line to exactly 234.57, 21.22 and it does! and it stays there! This drawing page likewise takes input from numbers, not from hand waving.

Sarkat, on the other hand, said, “You made it box. How did you?” And sat down and played with the controls until she figured it all out. Somewhat hampered by my idiosyncratic trackpad configuration. Also by it having less features and more bugs than it does now.

It also includes a Turns-Radians-Degrees interconversion function. Turns is the default angle unit, in support of the τ movement.

World Population by time zone, draft 1.1

Before you ask, the colors don’t mean anything, there just to make it easier to tell one bar from another.

Modified logarithmic scale.

All time zones are standard time for their locations, except for Russia.

6.9 billion people included. Not pictured: UTC+12:45 (pop. 650), UTC+13 (pop. 104,000), or UTC+14 (pop. 8,800). Some people not yet properly distributed where an administrative region crosses a timezone, such as western Kansas or eastern Micronesia (but many are).

(for other locations of Sulawesi, see 1, 2.)

2011/06/24, 10:45UTC-7: whoops, just noticed the UTC+12 bar isn’t in there by mistake, I hid it while doing some work, and forgot to re-show it. I’ll fix that when I get home from work.

2011/06/24, 15:50UTC-7: the spans, especially for NYC and Ca. are imprecisely constructed and on the logarithmic scale suggest meanings that are false (such as NYC having a population of 150 million). I will make them precise.

2011/06/24, 21:45UTC-7: Updated with both of these corrections. (previous version)

Yes, I really did. It was part of my application to IGN CodeFoo Academy. It seems to have impressed someone, since I was accepted!

kellan said it was a nice show of bravado. As in, “No one in their right mind would possibly do that, so you must know something I don’t.” Which was part of the fun.

It also demonstrates an interesting tool in my toolbox. Not a good tool for this problem, but a good tool for other problems, and one of my better tools. Thus, “My hammer, let me show you it.”

Oh, and if you don’t get the last panel, you should watch Doctor Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog.

When I started the Tabulation phase (which I’m still mostly in), I realized, “this calls for being a pivot table!” Luckily, unlike the last several times I’ve started a project and realized it required a pivot table, I actually have a pivot table tool available! Yay Google Docs!

Some random facts I’ve picked up while tabulating:

There is exactly one time zone which exists but has no population whatsoever: UTC+12:00.

Most areas either have Standard Time all year round, or Standard Time during local winter and Summer Time/Daylight Savings Time during local summer. There are 1.5 exceptions: Russia and Ireland. Ireland really does follow this pattern since 1971, but through historical frankensteinization calls its timezones Western European Time (winter) and Irish Standard Time (summer). Russia, on the other hand, is just sort of chuckling technically observes Daylight Savings Time all year round, in each of its 8 time zones, as of a few months ago (March 2011).

Arizona, though completely surrounded by regions that observe DST, does not observe DST. This I knew. What I didn’t know is that the Arizona Navajo Nation, which is mostly, but not entirely contained inside Arizona, does observe DST. But wait, there’s more. The Hopi Nation, which is entirely surrounded by the Navajo Nation doesn’t observe DST.

China is all one time zone. This I knew. But did you know that China shares border with every timezone from UTC+5 to UTC+11? Including UTC+5:30 and UTC+5:45 (because Nepal is a special snowflake).

Part of the fault for that lies with Russia’s wacky timezones, though. The UTC+11 timezone that China borders, Vladivostok Time, is geographically closer to +10 which is its technical standard time, though under the current rules, it never observes standard time. Actually, it’s even closer to +9, having the same longitudinal spread as Japan, which is at UTC+9 for its Standard Time. That’s the really weird part, Russia’s timezones were already shifted over. After first I though the permanent Daylight Savings-thing was to compensate for the time zones being drawn all shifted over. But, no, they shifted it the wrong way. It made it worse. Because Russia is impossible to understand with your brain.

Solar Bodies:

Hyperoperators:

The first two lines caught my attention as a phonologist: “Her name is Yoshimi/She’s a black belt in karate”. The rhyming words in both lines are Japanese. In Japanese “Yoshimi” would end with the high front vowel /i/, while “karate” would end with the mid front vowel /e/. That is, the vowel in the first line is a full step higher than the vowel in the second.

But in English, neither of the vowels are pronounced the same way. The English pronunciation of “karate” raises the final vowel to /i:/, as it does with most Japanese loanwords ending in /e/ (“kamikaze”, “karaoke”, etc.), and the singer (Wayne Coyne?) pronounces it as such. This is because English doesn’t use /e/ as a vowel at all. The closest English vowels would be either /ɛ/ or /eɪ/. But lax vowels like /ɛ/ can’t normally appear at the end of words, and /eɪ/ interacts with stress and meter differently than /i:/ and doesn’t like to appear like this at the end of a word when the preceding syllable is stressed. So in this position, the Japanese /e/ is bumped up to the third or fourth closest English vowel, /i/, and we get /kǝɹ’ɑ:ti:/.

Now I just said you can’t use lax vowels at the end of words in English. Except when you’re singing Rock music. In the name “Yoshimi”, which would also end in /i:/ in normal English, we see Rock and Roll vowel laxing to [ɪ]. Rock music is often sung in or influenced by a standard Rock and Roll accent, which includes laxing of word final [i:]‘s, archetypically in “baby” to “babih” (/beɪbi:/ to [beɪbɪ]).

My Phonetic Analysis professor once asserted, “You can’t make a tense vowel in that position or you’d lose your recording contract.” (Though The Flaming Lips don’t seem to have lost their recording contract over the tense vowel in “karate”.)

Now the tense/lax distinction in vowels is squidgy. Actually vowels in general are squidgy, but this distinction is particularly squidgy. But lax vowels are generally held to be lower than their corresponding tense vowels, along with whatever other characteristics distinguish them, which are not always agreed upon.

Taken together:
In Japanese, the first vowel would be a full step higher than the second ([i] over [e])
As sung in English, the first vowel is a small step lower than the second ([ɪ] under [i:]), due to the combination of how “karate” is borrowed plus Rock and Roll Vowel Laxing being applied to “Yoshimi” but not “karate”.

(Note: the whole first verse is “Her name is Yoshimi/She’s a black belt in karate/Working for the city/She has to discipline her body”. So the not-quite rhyme in the first two lines under discussion is only part of a verse-wide rhyming structure. I’m not critiquing the rhyme at all, I’m being amused by the reversal of vowel heights.)

2011.03.31:
I’m listening to Taran Wanderer right now, and I have to confess, I have no idea how it’s going to end.

I’ve been writing essays on this particular subgenre since I was 15, and Taran is clearly identifiable as an Arthur. So when Book Four is all about his quest to determine his parentage, you’d expect it to be obvious that he will turn out to be a long lost atheling.

Spoiler Warning

Except Alexander sometimes plays the tropes straight, and sometimes subverts them. In fact, in one surprising turn for the genre savvy, in The Book of Three Taran explicitly fails to draw the Sword in the Stone (Dyrnwyn), which bears the injunction, “DRAW DYRNWYN, ONLY THOU OF ROYAL BLOOD[...]“. This would seem to indicate that Taran is not an atheling.

On the other hand, Eilonwy goes on to say “Royal blood is just a way of translating; in the Old Writing, it didn’t mean only having royal relatives—anybody can have those. It meant—oh, I don’t know what you’d call it. Something very special.” And on the third hand, I get a little bit of a feeling of an injunction specifically against Taran taking the sword, which might indicate that he will later take it, but can’t take it yet for some reason. This may just be echoes of Magician’s Gambit in my head, though.

Taran wants to be of noble blood, though primarily because his romantic interest is a princess. But the books have a strange and mixed relationship with what Taran wants. Sometimes the lesson is that he was being childish to want it. Several times, he is put in a situation where he must give up what he wants for the greater good. But sometimes in those situations, he ends up being given what he wants anyway, sometime after he has chosen sacrifice. So what Taran wants is no good indicator of what will happen.

It is also of note that this book deals more with commoners than any of the previous books, and in fact even calls attention to that fact: “Never before in all his adventures had he shared hospitality with the farmer folk of Prydain, and he glanced around as wondering as a stranger in a new land.”

But, though the books more often than not deal with character from the nobility, except when the characters are outside the social hierarchy altogether, there are also anti-hierarchical themes, e.g. “For a man to be worthy of any rank, he must strive first to be a man.” and “I have learned there is greater honor in a field well plowed than in a field steeped in blood.” and the glorification (so far, though I haven’t actually reached their realm yet) of the folk of the Free Commots, who have no lords, but “rule themselves. Strong and steadfast they are, too.”

And finally, I note that in the first quarter of the book, Taran is offered a place as a surrogate son in two different families: first by a farmer family struggling to even maintain subsistence, and second by a king (though “duke” might better convey to most readers Smoit’s social position). He refuses both at least until after he finishes the task he has set before himself, unwilling to let the question eat at him for the rest of his life.

It’s a question I’m deeply curious about now, also. I continue to be more impressed by Alexander than I expect.