I realized today that I have too much money on my hands. I realized this because I found myself about to purchase five copies of Hydlide for $10. Hydlide is possibly among the top 10 worst games ever made, but that’s okay, since I wouldn’t be buying them to play, I’d be buying them to hang on my wall. I’m still gonna do it. But damn, there are bored children in Africa that need this game.
Fuck ‘em. I’m buying five copies of Hydlide for ten dollars.
I recently had the longest day I can remember having in several years. We woke up early to go disc golfing, which was my first time on an actual course. After that, Nick and I were scheduled to go to a Guitar Hero 2 release party at the Middle East. The day was supposed to be over after that. We were planning to head to bed early so we could wake up around 6am to go stand in line for a Wii, but then Jen and Ben gave us some intel that people were already lining up outside, so we upped the ante and went to wait in line too. All told, we didn’t end up sleeping until around 9am the next day (around 24 hours of being awake). This is not as easy as it was in college. I’m getting old.
Disc Golf
We found some free course at a park or something, which was really cool. The landscape was beautiful and interesting. Unfortunately, several of the “holes” were either near water or had you throw over a pond, and as a result we ended up throwing a lot of discs into the water. Most of these were retrievable, but we did end up losing two discs. My impression with these pond courses is that disc golf is trying to be like real golf, which seems like a bad idea. Golf balls are like 25 cents each, whereas discs are around 8-10 dollars. All told though, it was a good experience. I’m told that the pay courses are only 5 dollars or so, so it’s definitely a cheap and fun activity for an afternoon.
Guitar Hero 2 Release Party
My roommate Nick scored two tickets to this party at the Middle East in Central Square, which was awesome. In the upstairs they had a big high-def TV set up with Guitar Hero 2, where you could stand in line and play 2-player mode. Downstairs, there were a bunch of bands playing that did songs for the games. Our journey to the Middle East is documented on my Flickr account.
Wii
I promised myself I wasn’t going to camp out overnight for the Wii and then I did it anyway. It turned out to be pretty fun though. I was completely wrong about what this kind of thing would be like. The group was really organized. Instead of having a line in the traditional sense, they set up a list where you could sign yourself into the queue. After you did that, you were pretty much free to wander around, get food, or whatever (as long as you were physically present when the store opened). The people there were pretty cool. I was expecting a bunch of stereotypical nerds, but most of the people were pretty much like my roommates and me. Most people were pretty friendly. There were a surprising number of girls there. The three of us brought our DS’s, and we got a 7-player game of Mario Kart going with some people who had brought theirs too, which was awesome. We also got a pictochat going (where we drew a bunch of penises and then played Destructo).
My roommates and I have declared Stoop Day (October 5th) to be one of our apartment holidays. On Stoop Day, one traditionally drinks a 40 oz. bottle of malt liquor in a brown paper bag while sitting on the stoop in front of their apartment. The whooping of at passing ladies is encouraged, although whooping volume is not important. Cigars contribute to the feeling of celebration.
A song just came up that was tagged with both “music to slay a dragon to” and “songs to listen to when you riding to battle” [sic].
Our voting body has a lot of inertia. Somehow, the Democrats and the Republicans got established as the de facto primary parties. The notion that a third-party vote is “wasted” keeps these two parties in power; no party can get votes until there is sufficient confidence that they can win, but of course no party will get that kind of confidence if nobody votes for them. A classic catch 22. I refuse to be a part of this problem and so I vote for third parties, but the thing that gets me about this problem is that it actually does have a sort of logic to it. On some level, it does make some sense to restrict yourself to the two primary parties. And that is the fundamental problem with first-past-the-post (plurality) voting — that depending on how you look at it, it can make sense to vote for a candidate who is not your ideal choice. (I am talking mainly about the presidential election.)
There are a lot of proposed fixes to this problem, namely alternative voting methods. Condorcet, approval, and instant-runoff voting are all way better than our current system. Plurality voting is arguably the worst voting method, and how our system has worked for so long using it is beyond me. The nice thing about our electoral system is that it does not require any nation-wide initiative to implement these systems — states are free to adopt a better system and use it to determine how their electoral votes get spent. A nation-wide initiative would probably never get enough steam to be seriously considered, whereas it’s entirely conceivable that more progressive states could make the switch in the next few years.
The only problem that I see with this (and in my opinion it is a rather large problem) is that no matter how the states determine how they spend their electoral votes, the electoral vote is itself a plurality vote, and it will suffer from the same problems as the state votes. For example: Let’s say Massachusetts decides to use instant-runoff voting. During the next presidential election, people in Massachusetts feel safe in voting for their favorite third party candidate knowing that if he doesn’t take the state, their vote will default to the Democratic candidate. With this new voter confidence, that third party candidate gets enough votes and takes Massachusetts — hooray! In the electoral vote however, the Republican candidate wins barely enough votes and becomes president. Everyone in Massachusetts bitterly suffers under four years of Republican rule, knowing in the back of their minds that if they had voted Democrat, their electoral votes would have swung the election and they would have a Democratic president instead of a Republican one. They will not make this mistake in the next election. Essentially, while changing the state-wide voting system is definitely a step in the right direction, it is only a piece of the ideal solution.
One fix to the previous situation is to use fusion voting, where multiple parties can support the same candidate. In this system, third parties can gain popular confidence without “hurting” the primary parties until hopefully they gain enough confidence that they could win an election. Another benefit to this system is that it provides additional information to your vote — you can vote for the same candidate in multiple ways, and the party that you choose to go through lets the candidate know what you care about.
Another potential fix to the electoral problem that I thought of in a sleepless stupor last night, which as far as I know isn’t being considered at all, is to change the voting method for electoral votes. If plurality voting is a bad system, why use it anywhere? A seemingly quick fix would be to change the electoral college to use an approval voting system. If the Democrats take Massachusetts, let them cast their full 12 electoral votes toward the Democratic candidate. But if 10% of the state voted for the Green party, why not let them cast another 1 vote for the Green candidate? One consideration is whether a state would want to cast votes for both primary parties. Certainly, if swing states did this, they would no longer be as important in the election, and these states would have no incentive to do so, as they would receive less attention during campaigns. The elimination of “swing states” would be arguably good for the country as a whole, but even if each state only cast votes for one primary party and then as many third parties as they wanted, that would be much better than the current system.
Alternatively, states could use a ranking system such as condorcet voting. Whichever party gets the most votes, the state ranks that candidate first. The party with the second most votes gets ranked second, etc. This method would perhaps require less judgement on behalf of the electoral body, and would likely eliminate the question of how to vote for both of the primary parties.
If we enacted all these three changes: state voting method, electoral voting method, and fusion voting, I think our system would be pretty damn good. Luckily, these changes all together are only really necessary for the presidential election, since the electoral college problem isn’t present for the senate/house elections, for example — and simply implementing a state-wide condorcet vote would likely be an acceptable fix for that. As always, feedback/criticism is encouraged.
Tonight, Mikix and I tried an experiment. This experiment was inspired by the widely known property of helium that if you breathe it in, it changes the tone of your voice as you breathe it out. The explanation for this phenomenon that I learned is that your vocal chords vibrate differently in the medium of helium than they do in normal air, causing the change in your voice as helium passes over them.
The experiment was to surround a computer speaker in helium and see if it vibrated differently. We took a ziploc bag and placed the speaker in it, then fastened the zipper most of the way, leaving only enough room for the speaker’s chord to come out, and a little more leeway for the nozzle of our helium tank. I pressed out all the excess air of the bag before pumping helium into it. Then, Mikix played a couple of songs and we listened to the left speaker (inside the bag) and the right speaker (in normal air). The result of the experiment is that the speakers sounded exactly the same.
Hopefully, someone with a better knowledge of physics than I have can explain this.
Update on 09/27/2006:
My friend Kate has helpfully pointed me to the following article which explains the results of my experiment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium#Helium_Voice
From the article:
It is a common misconception that Helium’s effects on the voice are related to its density. The real explanation is slightly more complicated. Because Helium is monoatomic (earth’s atmosphere consists of over 95% diatomic molecules), its adiabatic index differs from that of air. This means that the speed of sound in helium is faster, and sound of the same frequency has a longer wavelength compared to in air. This difference results in the vibrational modes of the larynx corresponding to higher frequencies, and thus a higher pitched voice. An audio source which does not rely on a resonant air cavity (such as computer speaker) will not change pitch in a Helium atmosphere. If you took an orchestra to Jupiter (whose atmosphere is primarily Helium and Hydrogen), the winds would be out of tune but the strings would remain unchanged.
I just found this lying around on the server but I don’t think I’ve ever made a blog post about it. A higher resolution version can be found here. This fractal was generated from the Mandelbrot set with some photoshopping afterwards.
Today, my roommate Mikix and I headed down to Boston Common with a helium tank, a package of empty balloons, and a mission. That mission was to give away as many of the balloons as possible. Our estimate is that we gave away about 40 in total, which is not a bad chunk of the 55 or so we brought with us.
The very first balloon we inflated was given birth at our apartment, and we brought it with us on the T. Mikix named this one “Sir Balloonsalot” and we vowed that we would not give that one away. Unfortunately, a little girl was very insistant on getting a pink balloon and Sir Balloonsalot was the only inflated pink balloon we had at the time, so Mikix (begrudingly) gave it away.
Toward the end, business slowed down a bit so I started inhaling helium. The phrase “Hey kid, want a balloon?” sounds 10 times creepier than you think it does when said with a helium voice. I also discovered that Mikix doesn’t know how to breathe in helium from a balloon.
(Sir Balloonsalot is the pink one toward the bottom)
I was reading Slashdot at work today and came across an interesting thread about color, encoding of color, and the human perception of color (in an article tagged ’snakesonaplane’, no less). Here are some of the more interesting things I found.
1. Finding berries is exceedingly hard if you are red-green colorblind. To simulate what this might look like to a red-green colorblind person, I took an image containing some berries, split it into component RGB channels, and overwrote each of the red and green channels with the average of the two, then combined it all back into a master image. Here is the result. It is indeed hard to spot berries with no red-green information. Hooray for survival of the fittest. (You can click on the image for the original version.)
2. Most* display devices are unable to reproduce all colors. This almost certainly includes the monitor you’re looking at right now. CRT and LCD monitors show colors in the sRGB colorspace, which is some subset of the colors that the human eye can perceive (sRGB is an accepted standard). For a visual example of this, see the following image grabbed from Wikipedia.
I’m not sure I fully understand what is going on, but the outer curve encompasses the CIE 1931 color space**, which if I understand correctly is the most widely accepted approximation of the range of colors humans can see. The inner triangle encompasses the range of colors that can be expressed with sRGB. The big losers here are greens and cyans, though partcularly bright versions of other colors miss out as well. There are alternative RGB colorspaces that are used, though none as widely as sRGB. One popular such example is Adobe RGB, which is accepted to be much better than sRGB. RGB colorspaces need not even be used; there is also CMYK (Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Key[black]) , HSV (Hue-Saturation-Brightness), and others, though each of these has shortcomings as well. For example, CMYK is much better at displaying Cyan, but worse at displaying Red, as you might expect. In the above picture with the curve and the triangle, imagine if the points of the triangle were rotated about 45 degrees and you can get an idea of the kinds of extra colors you’d get and ones that would go missing.
For a more interactive example of how your monitor is unable to produce cyan, here is an interesting picture. In case you were never 6 years old and don’t know how these work, put your face near your monitor and stare at the white dot in the center of the red circle for about a minute. You should notice a faint blue aura around the circle start to form. As this happens, slowly move your face back from the monitor and it will get bigger. This color you are seeing is “true” cyan and cannot be displayed by your monitor — the approximations in sRGB are showed on the right for contrast.
We have a tradition here known as “Beer O’Clock”, which is technically 4:00pm every Friday, when everyone has a beer.
