Wow
Wow.
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While I was talking to Michelle about Disney's California Adventure, I heard the Dar Williams lyric about the incredible realism of a hypothetical "Western New York" theme park to be built in Southern California:
And the waitresses look like waitresses who want to leave for the West Coast.
The LNX-BBC project was covered in the current issue of Linux Weekly News.
I sent some presentation materials to IDG for inclusion on a conference CD. Trade show conferences aren't that academic.
I was sorry to see that the VegTime restaurant is closing, after it had previously cut back its hours. A letter posted there Thursday said the restaurant was losing money because people who used to go there a lot were getting laid off now.
I did some constrained writing, which I'll post here soon. I only have a copy on zork, and zork's network seems to be unavailable right now.
I had a bunch of really amazing dreams, most of which I don't remember. In one of them, San Francisco had been suddenly attacked with an atomic bomb, and I saw (from what might have been a place in Bernal Heights) a mushroom cloud forming over the Bay. I was terrified that I would soon be killed by the radiation or that I would breathe in or ingest some radioactive substance; I spent all my time trying to figure out the various risks and how to avoid them.
I'm pretty sure that almost all of my dreams in the past two days have either involved romance or war, death, or espionage.
I went over to Berkeley to try to visit the transit store with Lia. Visit the store we did, but they had no BART Plus passes or GGTA passes, so we didn't buy anything. We did manage to have a couple of meals with some neat people; a collaboration of three people beat me in a game of chess. Perhaps I should be ashamed because two of them were almost completely new to the game (still confused about rules like pawn promotion and castling), but they worked together well and were very clever about certain things. Often, one person would be an advocate pointing out a particular combination; later, a different person would take on the role for another combination. So you could say that, with enough eyeballs, all chess problems are shallow. (Didn't Kasparov play against the whole world one time? Did he win?)
That chess game revealed a lot about the importance of psychology in chess. Because they believed that I was very good (actually, I'm a novice chess player, although I learned to play at a young age), my opponents read a lot into everything I did. At one point, I made a severe blunder (losing a rook because I moved it under attack without defending it first), but my opponents felt that it must have been some kind of trap or tempo move or sacrifice or something. Nope, it was an error, but they didn't think I'd make an error like that. I did!
At another point, having seen this happen, I saw that they had a mate in two if I didn't defend my king. I seriously considered completely ignoring this and launching a bold attack, because I expected they'd say "he would never have made that attack if his king were in any real danger". But I wasn't that brave this time.
I had a nice time over there. My arms felt fairly well.
I read The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds by Jonathan Rosen. I found a lot of interesting bits there.
Something Catholicism has in common with Judaism (from a conversation today, not from Rosen's book): enumerated lists with particular numbers of items. For example, the charismata; the sefirot. There are lots of standard lists and (for some reason) students have been asked to memorize them and to be able to recite them.
I was also reading Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language. There are even more interesting bits there.
Poor John Wilkins!
His list was rather based upon empirical criterial and he sought those notions to which all rational beings might either attest or, reasonably, be expected to attest: thus, if everybody agrees on the idea of a God, everybody would likewise agree on the botanical classification supplied to him by his colleague John Ray.
Contact: Seth David Schoen