“Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn’t know because they might reflect badly on Democrats.”

— Jim Treacher, getting righter every day...

"Oh, joy, Tuf and Tuf again. I can hardly wait."


George R. R. Martin’s Tuf Voyaging remains sadly out of print, but some small quantity of a relatively recent small-press edition are available directly from the author, autographed.

I made sure to place my order before mentioning this on my blog, just in case. My two paperback copies of the book are both starting to lose pages, and it’s an old favorite.

"I feel obliged to point out that a rather large carnivorous dinosaur has appeared in the corridor behind you, and is presently attempting to sneak up on us. He is not doing a very good job of it."
-- Haviland Tuf, Ecological Engineer

Ouch! Massive quake and tsunami hit Japan


Magnitude 8.9 off the coast near Sendai, with many significant aftershocks. USGS reports that there was a 7.2 magnitude quake in the same area two days ago, which had three 6+ magnitude aftershocks.

[Update: Brickmuppet has some disturbing details; coastal trains just “missing”, a city of 77,000 wiped off the map, etc. So far the best news I’ve seen is that the nuclear power plant that didn’t have enough coolant for a safe shutdown has been resupplied by air by the US Air Force (no, Hillary was talking out of her ass again).]

[Update: The American Red Cross doesn’t have a targeted donation page up yet for this disaster, but as reported by Reuters and elsewhere, they’ve set up an instant text-message donation system, and of course their standard international donation fund will be used to help out in Japan and elsewhere. I don’t see a way to contribute directly to the Japanese Red Cross on their site, but I’m sure we’ll find something when we arrive in Kyoto in two weeks.]

[Update: Wikipedia, Google Crisis Response pages]

[Update: Amazon is processing Red Cross payments through a prominently-displayed button on their home page. Amazon Japan has a letter on their home page redirecting to the Japan Red Cross donation site, which is currently a bit flaky.]

Dear Wisconsin Democrats,


This is not “what democracy looks like”, this is what a temper tantrum looks like. If you wanted democracy, you should have spent the last three weeks hounding your senators to stop hiding out in hotels and go back to their jobs.

Competitive advantage


Merrill reflects on Ila’s qualifications….

more...

Notes on finishing a novel


A novel in Japanese, that is, converted into a custom “student edition” at precisely my reading level, as described previously.

  1. Speed and comprehension are good; once I resolved the worst typos, parsing errors, and bugs in my scripts, I was able to read at a comfortable pace with only occasional confusion. Words that didn't get looked up correctly are generally isolated and easy to work out from context, and most of the cases where I had to stop and read a sentence several times turned out to be odd because the thing they were describing was odd (such as what the guard does before allowing the original Kino to enter the city in Natural Rights). Of course, it helps to have a general knowledge of the material.
  2. Coliseum was changed significantly for the animated version of Kino's Journey; the original story leaves most of the opponents shallow and one-dimensional, and spends way too much time on the mechanical details of Kino's surprise (both the preparation the night before, and the detailed description of the physical impact and aftermath). Mother's Love, on the other hand, is a pretty straight adaptation.
  3. Casual speech and dialect don't cause as much problem as you might expect. MeCab handles a lot of the common ones, and recovers well from the ones it has to punt on. They didn't confuse me too often, either. After a while. :-)
  4. One thing that MeCab sometimes gets wrong is when a writer uses pre-masu form instead of te-form when listing a series of actions. I don't have a good example at the moment, but I ran into several where it punted and looked for a noun.
  5. The groups that scan, OCR, and proofread novels tend to miss some simple errors where the software guessed the wrong kanji. A good example is writing 兵士 as 兵土 or 兵上. Light novels generally aren't that complicated, and if a word looks rare or out of place, it may well be an OCR error.
  6. The IPA dictionary used by MeCab has some quirks that make it sub-optimal for use with modern fiction. Reading 空く as あく, 他 as た, 一寸 as いっすん, 間 as ま, 縁 as えん, and 身体 as しんたい are all correct sometimes, but not in some common contexts where their Ipadic priority causes MeCab to guess wrong. Worse, it has a number of relatively high-priority entries that are not in any dictionary I've found: 台詞 as だいし, 胡坐 as こざ, 面す and 脱す as verbs that are more common than 面する and 脱する, etc. It also has no entries for みぞれ, 呆ける, 粘度, 街路樹, and a bunch of others. Oddest of all, there are occasions where it reads 達 as いたる; this is a valid name reading, but name+達 is far more likely to be たち than いたる; some quirk of how it calculates the appropriate left/right contexts when evaluating alternatives, an aspect of the dictionary files that I definitely don't understand.
  7. I need to make better use of the original furigana when evaluating MeCab output. I'm preserving it, but not using it to automatically detect some of the above errors. Mostly because I don't want the scripts to become too interactive. Perhaps just flagging the major differences is sufficient.
  8. On to book 2!

Well, at least it's got a catchy title


Can’t go wrong with a title like “Regarding Ducks and Universes”, even when a quick inspection reveals that it’s a first novel published through Amazon’s vaguely-described Encore program.

I’m not recommending it, mind you, and I’m not even using my affiliate code in that link. I just found it interesting that Amazon is aggressively promoting an SF title by a complete unknown, as opposed to the usual “Kindle vanity press” or POD semi-publishing approaches.

How did I miss this?


Donna Barr is putting both Stinz and The Desert Peach online.

Stinz is still in issue 1, before the war, but the Peach is all the way up to issue 21.

Lots of good stuff, but watching The Desert Fox hang ten is still one of my favorite bits.

Dear Recaptcha,


This goes way beyond “not funny”, all the way to “incredibly stupid”. Does someone do even basic quality control on your source images? I’m thinking the answer is a rather firm No.

Recaptcha from Hell

[Update: Just saw one go by where one word was in cyrillic and the other in hebrew; sadly, I clicked refresh before I could stop to grab the screenshot.]

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”