I assume that in this context you're not counting 1 as prime, and that you mean one each of power of 2^a and 3^b, in either order (a and b being integers). Because otherwise, of course,

2^6 - 3^2 - 2^1
= 64 - 9 - 2
= 53

2^5 + 2^4 + 2^2 + 2^0
= 32 + 16 + 2 + 1
= 53

(i.e. 53 is 110101 in binary)

What the heck is a hack?

Oh, I could come up with examples, such as Alexandre Dumas, but I'm really asking about a definition. Our American Heritage dictionary says that a hack is (1) a worn-out horse for hire, (2) a person who undertakes unpleasant or distasteful tasks for money or reward, and (3) a writer hired to produce routine or commercial writing.

A couple of years ago, though, I caught Stephen King coming up with a new definition during a talk on CSPAN2: a writer who plans a book in advance is a hack.

I guess that, by the same standards, Alfred Hitchcock, who extensively planned his films, was the ultimate hack of the movie world.

Still, there's a difference between an outline and a specification, and I can see writing to a specification being one way of being a hack. Trouble is, I've seen some fine writing which, for various reasons, could be classified as hack writing. Go and check out some of what Diane Duane produces, such as for the "Net Force Explorers" series.

And looking at writers such as Dumas, or Dickens, churning out long books for money. I'm told that Dumas suffers from bad translation, but I hardly think that either can fairly be called hacks.

Bron Fane, maybe...

Moving swiftly on, the Schwartzian transform is a hack, although not as much of a hack as Duff's Device.

If so, that's what I'd call a hack job.

Stephen King, he's just... well... a rambler in dire need of an editor.

(Bless Portland and its many indie movie venues.)

The story struck me as . . . well, not bad, or lacking, but just kind of ordinary. Maybe more for younger folks than me.

The acting was good; the dialog and characterization were clever and enjoyable.

But the visuals, and the visual imagination behind the visuals . . . oh. Oh my. That was just incredible work.

Stephen King is just wrong here, IMO. And I say this as a freak who straddles both sides of the planner-pantzer divide.

The American Heritage's definition of hack is perhaps not a specimen of their best work. (Among other things, they seem to have entirely missed hack as a synonym for taxicab.) When a hack is a horse, its primary characteristic isn't that it's old or broken down; it's that it's for hire, or adapted to general work, or both.

I'm not entirely clear on the etymological relationship between hack and hackney -- the latter being either a breed of flashy driving pony, or a carriage for hire. It occurs most commonly in hackney carriage, which is usually shortened to hackney or hack.

As you've probably figured out by now, a hack writer is simply someone who writes for hire. A secondary and somewhat outmoded sense of the word is that a hack is someone who's paid to clothe others' thoughts and opinions in more felicitous language. It isn't a synonym for "untalented." If it were, you wouldn't find old reference books temperately praising Defoe as "...the most practised and versatile journalist and hack writer of the day."

Anyway, he should remember that what works for him may not work for others. Different strokes for different folks.

I remember Leigh Brackett in an intro to a story collection saying how she didn't plan. Her hubby Edmond Hamilton, upon finding that out, apparently exclaimed that was a Hell of a way to write a story.

I've always found Flaubert kind of meh. But Victor Hugo, who also wrote for money, is one of my favorite non-sf novelists.

It does have those certain touches I mentioned, howver. Maybe that was all subconscious.

In a related note, I have going through season 1 of Xena (yay, Netflix!) and the plot of one of last night's episodes gave me pause: A minor king is moonlighting as a warlord and leading The Bad Guys on regular raids against his principality as a way of keeping the citizens in fear and keeping their high taxes for him and his cronies.

I sure hope tonight's episodes include some hot guest star (Ares? Hades? Autolycus?) to distract me from the notion that Our President is getting some of his ideas from campy TV shows.

Havin little prior experience of the properties of prime numbers, I was amazed at how regular their progression is: a simple x-y graph of prime number versus its sequence number produces a curve that is remarkably smooth (at least at the scale of a graph for the first 1000).

Probing ever so slightly below the surface, I plotted the differences between adjacent primes. While the result wasn't too edifying, I noticed that difference number 217 (between 1327 and 1361) was a notable outlier. The difference of 34 was the highest of all in the first 1000, and significantly higher than other differences in the first 250.

Can local wizards comment on this? You know who you are.

http://www.snopes.com/science/nobel.htm

At least some of Dumas's works were written by another writer based on his outline, then polished up by the master. This may be why he is put in the "hack" category.

pi(x) is the mathematical notation for "the number of prime numbers less than or equal to x". So pi(53) is 16, since there are 16 primes less than or equal to 53 (2,3,5,7,11,13,17,19,23,29,31,37,41,43,47,53).

I must admit I'd never seen the original proposition that Theresa wrote about. Now I have to go find out if it's a conjecture, and if not, the proof! Another couple of hours to waste!

Cheers, Julian

let sort f u =
let u = Array.map (fun x -> x, f x) u in
Array.sort (fun (_, a) (_, b) -> Pervasives.compare a b) u;
Array.map (fun x, _ -> x) u

In OCaml, I probably wouldn't start with this data in an array in the first place. It would probably be in a list. Or even more likely, a Cf_seq type, i.e. a lazy list.

Watch:

What's your favorite prime number? Mine is 11.

The only direct influence we know Jordan has acknowledged is Tolkien: "The only deliberate connection between WOT and any other modern fantasy was giving the first 100-odd pages of TEOTW a Lord of the Rings-esque flavor, to start people off in familiar territory." [from Dublin talk, 11/93, Emmet O'Brien]

Personally, I think he maybe took the parallelism a little too far, but others maybe disagree.

In a complete tangent, I'm happy to report that Chicken Little is a quite fun light SF film suitable for all ages. Worth seeing.

-r.
p.s. Here's a pair of extracts for those who didn't follow the links:

For he was to become now, as I was shortly to find, as coldly calculating as an adding machine sitting on the North Pole!

Elsa, this day, had just completed a single leaf of those several million green leaves yet to be done, and had climbed off her stool to survey it from a distance--when her phone rang.

The Democrats still won't be my party, though. Oh, well, at least they're not crazy.

As for favorite prime numbers, I claim 5.

I was born on 5/25 of a multiple of 5 year....

On hackery - we purchased, at a steam railway fair, an ancient book which consisted entirely of the fares for hackney carriages (as in the horse-drawn variety) for specific routes in London. An attempt to standardise charges before the advent of the meter. Hundreds and hundreds of routes in a London much smaller than it is now. Fascinating.

This means that several substantial extracts are available at: http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/page/0,12956,1636156,00.html (no subscription seems to be necessary) This page is list of extracts published to date, along with a leader, an interview, and a couple of related articles by Guardian journalists.

The extracts from the book by the man who was British Ambassador during much of the planning for the Iraq war contain some things worth knowing, such as:
"I found myself repeatedly answering the question: did something said by Jack Straw or Geoff Hoon represent the prime minister's views? Sometimes it did not. Indeed, throughout this period, the Foreign Office impinged little on my life. Between 9/11 and the day I retired at the end of February 2003, on the eve of war, I had not a single substantive policy discussion on the secure phone with the FO."
"When this document was drafted none of those conditions was anywhere near to being met. Nor, at the time the leaked cabinet note was drafted, had we left the starting gate in pursuit of the UN or building an international coalition."
"This was a lousy backdrop to taking part in any military action against Iraq."
"Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, said to me later that we were the only ally that mattered."
"Just before Blair arrived at Camp David, I received a phone call from one of the most experienced and prominent foreign policy practitioners of the Clinton administration. The familiar voice warned me that Cheney, Bush's sometimes intimidating vice-president, would be present throughout Blair's discussions with the president. "How the hell do you know?" I asked. "Don't ask, don't tell," was the enigmatic reply. "But Blair had better watch out.""

And also some things I'd rather not know:
"Blair put on a pair of ball-crushingly tight dark-blue corduroys. I was later told that his wardrobe for the weekend had been the result of intensive debate within No 10." A very bad mental image, but a very good metaphor.

The overall smoothness of the plot is the result of the Prime Number Theorem, which says that any positive number n has approximately n/log n primes less than it (with the approximation getting better as n gets larger). Since a plot of n/log n would look exactly like a smooth curve, this means that a plot of the nth prime number should look almost like a smooth curve.

I can't entirely account for the large prime gap you noticed. Part of the reason for it, though, is that 1320 has a lot of smallish prime factors (2, 3, 5, and 11); this means that, if we add some small number to 1320, odds are that that small number will share a prime factor with 1320, and so the sum won't be prime. This idea shows that all but seven of the numbers in your range (namely 1333, 1337, 1339, 1343, 1349, 1351, and 1357) have some small factor (because all the numbers between 7 and 41 are multiples of either 2, 3, 5, or 11, with the seven exceptions 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, and 37).

DVDs are selling like hotcakes…and everyone’s buying (begging the question…have you ever seen a run on pancakes? Was there some Depression era shortage on pancakes of which I am not aware?).

that is all
-r.

This reminds me of a comment made by a fantasy writer after we had seen Jim Henson's Labyrinth. She especially liked all the scenes where David Bowie was surrounded by muppets. Why? In those scenes, the camera was usually at muppet eye-level. And if you don't remember, Bowie's pants left nothing to the imagination.

I don't know which is worse, when thinking of Blair's: associate them with David Bowie, or with the Wallace & Gromit short film with trousers as their subject.

So yeah, let's share. :)

... difference number 217 (between 1327 and 1361) was a notable outlier. The difference of 34 was the highest of all in the first 1000, and significantly higher than other differences in the first 250.

The prime density is smoother than you'd expect from a probabilistic approach, because the prime density has a negative feedback mechanism--too few primes now translates into too few factors (so more primes) later, and vice versa. I recall something I heard thirty-some years ago about how the prime gaps are especially chaotic, too, but the details escape me. Google for "prime gaps" and you get hundreds of matches, many very good.

Can local wizards comment on this? You know who you are.

Suddenly, I am a strict constructionist.

Maybe there's still time before we're consigned to Math Anxiety Hell... My favorite prime is 2.

Monster Grendel's tastes are plainish:
Breakfast? Just a couple Danish.

Balboa's claim sounds a little like Aguirre's claim: " we take more territory with every mile we drift"

The verse for ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND always cracked me up. It began: "Holed up with bunny/ pre-teen acts funny..."

I loved that book.

"Humbert gloats: his young nymphet
Is 'ineffable'--and yet
'Eff'able as she can get."

I used to have that book in college; I keep looking out for it at library sales. The other bit I remember is the Moll Flanders entry, where, after quoting the original title page (which lays out the entire plot for you: "five times a wife, whereof once to her own brother..."!) it ends, in reference to her eventual repentance at around age 75: "Love your sense of timing, Moll."

I would've assumed that the Stephen King quote was tongue-in-cheek. I'm sure he respects many writers who don't do improvisational plotting...could this be a sarcastic reaction to being so often called a hack himself?

Serge:

Milady cooks up a sob story and the guard quickly falls for it. In the book, that sob story goes on for a whole long chapter.

As a matter of fact, it's more like 3-4 chapters. Which are long, yes. Personally, though, they're some of my favorite of the book (she corrupts the Puritan guard through his own religious enthusiasm...which just rocks), since Milady's far and away the character I like best. Without even getting into the fact that D'Artagnian basically *rapes* her halfway through the book, I think I'd be pretty angry at mankind in general if, upon discovering that I'd been a thief at some time in the past, my sanctimonious asshat of a husband immediately stripped me naked and hanged me from the nearest tree. I mean, geez, Athos...way to love, honor and cherish.

Do you have a favorite movie depiction of d'Artagnan? Michael York was accurate as far as the jerky d'Artagnan went. But I far prefered Gabriel Byrne in Man in the Iron Mask.

I was looking at a movie guide for information about the story's various versions when I came across this tidbit about the 1940 movie: one of its scriptwriters was Aldous Huxley.

Also, Dinosaurs and Sodomy may have changed my life. Mostly in the direction of more dinosaurs. Well. Wombats and moose, really, but still.

On the other hand, Brooke, Milday did kill Constance.

Well, yeah. Years later. (She was only about 16, IIRC, when Athos-before-he-was-Athos did his little attempted murder. I know, thieves were commonly hanged in this time period. Still. Dude.) Anyway, I wasn't saying she was a character to emulate, just that I found her more sympathetic (even in her badly misplaced anger) than most of the Musketeers. And I totally wasn't disagreeing with you on the "hack" bit.

Dorothy Parker:

"Although I work, and seldom cease,
On Dumas pere and Dumas fils,
Alas, I cannot make me care,
For Dumas fils and Dumas pere."

In re: film adaptations...Byrne was good, you're right. Was that the same one that had Gerard Depardieu as Porthos? 'Cause that was great. The '90s era Disney adaptation, though, lives in infamy...despite the hilarious awesomeness of Tim Curry as a lascivious Richelieu.

Bwah.

As for Gabriel Byrne, yes, that was the version with Depardieu as Porthos.

That's pretty much what I always assume people mean when they use the word.

Unless I'm reading Georgette Heyer or something, and it's describing a horse. I wonder how those meanings are connected, and if it relates to the verb. Like, "this story was hacked out of the author's brain without any attempt at organization."

Off-topic: Heyer is occasionally hilarious in her blinker-wearing obsession with period language. One of my favorite quotes ever comes in "Sylvester, Or: The Wicked Uncle," when the hero says to the heroine, quite innocently, "You must allow me to mount you while you're in town."

He's offering to loan her a horse, of course. Why are you sniggering?

Tim Curry is awesome in anything. I'll watch him in a commercial, I'll watch him even when he phones it in. I will watch him in a skirt, I will watch him with a quirt...

It opens tonight here. And yes, I have already seen it. And yes, I will be seeing it again.

And, with the unintentional, this is absolutely the funniest page of the Superdickery site:

http://www.superdickery.com/seduction/3.html

It...it just keeps going on! And on! And by the fourth panel I'm practically hyperventilating.

It is perhaps the case that motherhood agrees with her.

For those wanting a bit more detail, I did a why watch post on LJ a while ago.

> Tim Curry is awesome in anything.

Congo? I mean yes, Tim Curry is great, but Congo?

> The new Kate Bush album contains a highly suggestive song about laundry, and another song where she's singing the digits of pi in a wistfully romantic way.

I read a (quite positive) review of the album which described her as "still madder than a box of frogs". Quite.

> It is perhaps the case that motherhood agrees with her.

I've always found her music to be a fine emulsion of incredibly good and incredibly awful bits, and that's still the case. I'm very glad she's finally recorded again - and the second disk is just inspiring.

Nobody is good enough that everything always works. (Though pretty much everything on "The Red Shoes" does.) I tend to take the occasional awful bits as an indication of not playing it safe. (Similar to Leonard Cohen's willingness to get up in public and sing his own songs.)

And, rather like the various comments about Tim Currie, I'll forgive the person responsible for "Waking the Witch" and that take on the Jig of Life almost anything.

"'Seventeen!', shouted the Bug, who was usually the first with the wrong answer." (Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth)

The proof that 17 is the largest finite number, possibly out of the pejorative calculus (which also proves that Alexander the Great did not exist \and/ he had an infinite number of limbs.)

I'm partial to 137, which in addition to being the fine structure constant (? reciprocal?) was snuck into the ST:TNG pilot -- probably not because it was running around fandom at the time, but one never knows.

> Nobody is good enough that everything always works.

Oh I agree completely - I think she's capable of doing excellent work for exactly the same reasons she's capable of doing awful stuff - taking chances. The sublime and the ridiculous are very close companions.

Nick Cave is someone who's spent a lot of time in that territory too.

>(Though pretty much everything on "The Red Shoes" does.)

Oddly enough, I work with a rabid Kate Bush fan who thinks that's her one unlistenable album - damned if I see why.

Though thinking of granularity of tastes, I realised the other day that both my wife and I love half of a particular Sonic Youth song and hate the other half. Needless to say, we don't agree on which is the good half. I don't think granularity comes much finer.

Genuine? Or a turning to greener pa$ture$, inspired by the caustic reception of her last horror novel?

I've only ever seen this dubbed in Japanese. I don't speak Japanese. Maybe that's why I enjoyed it thoroughly. The voice actor they hired to speak all of Tim Curry's lines was awesome.

I wonder how many bad films are substantially better when you watch them dubbed in languages you don't understand. I saw Cube in a French theatre, and found it delightfully confusing. Later, I watched it in English and wanted to destroy the rented DVD rather than give it back.

> I wonder how many bad films are substantially better when you watch them dubbed in languages you don't understand.

I used to buy a lot of French comics (or should I say Bandes Dessinees) because of the jaw droppingly beautiful artwork. Finally getting to read some in translation didn't make me very happy.

Out here, it is still playing in multiple theaters a month after it opened. If it was poison it would have been long gone.

I did read that Whedon got it made well under budget and got some attention for that feat.

Twice. On THE TIM CURRY SHOW and on the remake of FAMILY AFFAIR. And the reason those showed flopped was because they were comedies.

My theory is that Tim Curry is, at heart, a dramatic actor, rather than a comedic actor. He's been cast in many comedy films, but his portrayals of the various characters of those films have always had a certain gravitas, a dignity, that wasn't present in the failed tv series. He's been essentially a straight character caught in comedic circumstances.

So I was thinking, what remake of a tv series WOULD be suitable for Curry's talents?

And I think the answer is: LOU GRANT

The original tv show had its comedic moments, but overall was mostly dramatic in tone and execution. And I think Curry as the aging, sardonic editor of a major newspaper (Ed Asner in the original) would be friggin' great!

[aging fanboy exits stage left]

Tim Curry now... I would watch him in a box; I would watch him without socks. I agree, he has great gravitas, and it makes the comedic parts funnier. Rocky Horror is the ultimate example. I didn't see Congo. I didn't know Curry was in Congo, and to tell the truth, never mind Dr. Seuss, I wouldn't watch Congo despite Curry's presence in it. (But the Green Eggs and Ham rhyme is so fun...)

Though actually, reading the various definitions for "Hack" offered here it seems that a conglomerated definition would be something like this:

Hack
A writer who produces a great volume of work according to a basic set of themes/forumlas who is handsomely rewarded with both money and popularity.

In which case I'll give Dumas a strong Maybe in the Hack department. I'm only halfway through Monte Cristo now, but I am definitely in love, in a "Man I should go to sleep I have to work tonight but maybe one more chapter arg can't stop!" way.

Wait. What am I saying?

OK, I'd listen to Leonard Cohen do that.

I wouldn't watch anyone do that.

... *wanders off singing 'young men will do it/if they come to it/by cock they are to blame...' but not in the direction of running water*

If it were occasional...

After the ending of The Corinthian, I have come to believe she was about as innocent as O'Brien, if so innocent.

Well, so much for everything sounding like Coldplay.

Looking forward to the "Make:Out" issue of Make magazine, with such articles as

Let's Play "Hide the iPod"

MIDI Moan Enhancement

Eight Ways to Humiliate Your Roomba

DRM for Teledildonics: You Know Sony Wants It

Reich Meets Fuller and They Get to Talking: The Legend of the Dymaxorgone Chamber

"every dino wants a box of chocolates/and a long stemmed rose ..."

We moved when I was in college and got 985937, also prime.

Sadly neither of these is a valid phone number anymore since the phone company added a prefix digit, depriming both numbers in the process.

I dropped the vampires after #3 or 4, but admire her ability to present the experience of supernatural realities in something like an accurate way. This gives me hope for the Christ series. A concern would be that she seems to excel in portraying narcissists, and hope she doesn't go there with Jesus....

Leah - I envy your first encounter with the Count. May I ask, are you reading it abridged or no? I listened to it abridged and A) did not feel cheated at all, and B) was totally captivated. It seems to me to contain the original of so many figures and plot points that are patterned in later fiction. The experience was, "Aha! So THAT'S where that came from!" And - what a story.

(1) 1 is not prime because it is a unit. This in turn is the algebraist's fancy way of saying "It screws up our later constructions!" (to be quite exact, the ideal within Z generated by 1 is all of Z. Thus 1 doesn't generate a proper ideal, whereas all prime ideals are proper...)

(2) The Nobel story is indeed very snopes-worthy, but it is also very common among mathematicians as well - it took me several years until I bothered to convince myself it wasn't true.

(3) My favourite prime, hands down, is 91. Why? Because (as John H. Conway points out) it is the smallest almost-prime. It fails all the 'obvious' divisibility checks: Not even. Number sum not divisible by 3. Not ending in 5 or 0. Not two equal digits after another. And not a square.
Ok, so it's not a -prime-.... But it's neat!

I agree that it hasn't flopped, but it hasn't been a box-office success either. According to Box Office Mojo, it's grossed about $35 million so far, which is less than the production cost of $39 million. DVD sales will presumably give the total a healthy bump, but I can't imagine that Universal will do much more than break even. A pity - it was a fun film, though the series at its best was better.

Now, Duff's Device, on the other hand— there's a hack worthy of naming after an inventor.

When interviewing we used to give this to people and ask them what it did. Reactions varied between horror and admiration, and sometimes both from the same person.

Yes, no codpieces for that coming-of-age fantasy.

"I'm NOT fifteen."
"I know, you're too old for me"

(Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in Charade)

Tim Curry in a dramatic series? Been done already. Remember Earth 2?

Google your phone numbers! Are they doing anything extra, or are you their only escape from total obscurity?

Am I the only one who liked Rucker's discussion of unmanagebly large numbers? IIRC, the idea was that, due to real world constraints, there are numbers so big and so far from handy landmarks that they can't be specified.

"I'm partial to 137, which in addition to being the fine structure constant (? reciprocal?) was snuck into the ST:TNG pilot -- probably not because it was running around fandom at the time, but one never knows."
This rang a bell to me. 137, I mean. When I was younger, I started a book called "The God Particle," by Leon Lederman, and I think 137 was mentioned in the foreword (which is about all I ever managed to plod through). Isn't this Planck's constant, or something? I remember his saying that there's some whole big equation thing, with various units of measure, etc., but when you solve, everything magically disappears except for 137.
Admittedly, my memory is fuzzy.

I've been reading about "Out of Egypt," Anne Rice's new novel, and I think her conversion is pretty genuine, and seems to coincide with the death of her husband. I won't read it. I read twenty pages of "Interview with the Vampire," and that was about it. I've heard she's cut down her language considerably, and that this present story is told from the perspective of a seven-year-old Yeshua ben Miryam, and I've even heard it compared not unfavorably to Hemingway, but, then, I was never a huge fan of his, either.

And I love "Labyrinth". And Jennifer Connelly. Soooo beautiful. Ironically, I think she's rarely looked better than she did in "The Hulk." I look forward to "Dark Water," too, because I've heard it's a lot of Jennifer Connelly wet.

I can't comment on hackdom. I don't really know quite what the qualifications might be. I'll end up being called one, one day, though.

I think this trend in French comics started in 1975 when the magazine Metal Hurlant was born. If you ever bothered reading its American offspring Heavy Metal, you'll notice that the graphic aspect is superb while the storytelling aspect fell off to the side. Up till then, most comics were mostly staid, graphically. And there were some things they just didn't deal with. Then the above magazine was born and gave artists way more freedom. Some of which was used for rather disgusting stuff. But there is good stuff, although I don't really keep in touch much anymore now that I'm in the USA.

As for Ann Rice, I tried reading her Mummy book. I tried.

Say, was L.Ron Hubbard a hack? (I never tried to read him. When I think of him, I think of 1984's LAcon II and the giant inflatable mosquito/man/alien the scientologists had on display just outside of the premises.)

(Let's see if the content filter accepts this version of the post...)

OK, what the heck IS the fine structure constant? I don't mean the actual number. What's it govern or determine? What things is it a ratio of? Or whatever?

IBM were quite proud a few years ago to have factored 15
with a quantum computer. They had reasons to be proud
of this, but explaining them would take us too far afield and
be too much like work.

Returning the theme to fiction writing, what is your favorite
page of a novel to read in isolation as a sample of the writing
style? I think there was a ReaderCon panel sometime back
about the "page 117 test". But 117 is not prime either...

I think this trend in French comics started in 1975 when the magazine Metal Hurlant was born. If you ever bothered reading its American offspring Heavy Metal . . .

Doesn't "Metal Hurlant" mean something more like "Screaming Metal"? Do francophones use that same phrase to refer to heavy metal music?

Terrible movies being better when you don't understand the language: I've experienced this. We were watching a really GREAT Jet Li movie on one of the Spanish HBO channels. After about half an hour we switched to the English version of the movie and it was dreadful.

And, for the twelve-year-old in you:
David Bowie's Area

Yeah, only 1/2 of a full season.

If you're a huge fan or have a lot of time on your hands, there are a couple of scripts for unproduced episodes of Firefly floating around on the internet. They were readable but nothing spectacular, IMHO.

There was a comic book tie-in with the Serenity movie that filled some gaps between the original Firefly episodes and the film. IIRC, the storyline (and possibly the actual text) of these was provided by Joss Whedon. I haven't read it or talked to anyone who has.

Slightly off-topic, there have been serious stirrings about seeing the further adventures of Buffy's Spike and Angel's Ilyra in made-for-TV movies. Joss Whedon and the actors (James Marsters & Amy Acker) were dropping a lot of hints to that effect during the pre-Serenity hypefest. It remains to be seen whether the will actually happen and, if so, to what degree Joss Whedon will be involved. You probably already know that Whedon is currently signed to do a Wonder Woman movie.

Digging deeper:

If you're a deeply, insanely hardcore fan of all things even peripherally Whedon, Marti Noxon (one of the creative forces behind BTVS) had a short-lived series called Point Pleasant last year. It was a pretty seriously flawed variation of a typical teens-on-the-beach soap revolving around a girl who was the devil's daughter. I watched maybe half of the aired episodes. I can see why the show didn't do well, but there were a couple of good bits in most episodes, and one or two episodes aired that were actually pretty good by any standard. The total series, including some unaired episodes, is now on DVD but, again, I haven't seen it. My understanding is that the unaired episodes were among the best of the series in that they dropped most of the smooching on the beach to make more room for evil.

The passage of time has not made this idea seem any less weird.

*Tangential note: I just bought a copy of Civilization III (it was cheap), and the thing keeps building "musketmen" when I discover gunpowder. I wonder what was wrong with musketeer.

It just...didn't go anywhere. It was one A-plot stretched out into three issues--I kept waiting for something to happen. A few pages from the end, Shepherd Book was standing next to a stooping Simon with some heavy machine tool in his hand, and said something like, "Don't remind me I'm a man of God. It only makes this harder." I was so expecting him to clock Simon. That, my friends, would have been plot progression. (Not that I don't adore the good doctor. 'Cause I'm right there with Kaylee) As it was, I think that little mini-series has to be regarded as a marketing ploy, pure and simple. That wouldn't surprise me coming from anyone but Joss, but OMG have you read his "Astonishing X-Men"? It's...it's...wow.

(For the true Whedon fans--he had a cameo on last night's "Veronica Mars." Which, if you aren't watching, shame on you. Best show on TV right now. Season 1 is out on DVD--friggin' Netflix it or something.)

Here's a link to an unfilmed _Firefly_ script called "Dead or Alive". If anyone else has links to more, please do leave them here.

Nor have the events of Vingt Ans Plus Tard. Unless "Lord" de Winter was actually . . . no, this is starting to sound like an X-Men Annual.

Although a book called Les Mousquetaires: un Travesti might just . . . aaaaah, I've got enough to do.

(I was going to say other things, but have forgotten them in the lengthy discussions of Dumas, an author whom I have not actually read, Mr. Brust's related books notwithstanding.)

Whedon's X-men comic is glorious because he's pulling in all kinds of loose threads and references from twenty years ago; he's writing the 80's X-men with Whedon dialogue. Throw in some Talking Heads music and I'm liable to start having high school flashbacks.

I can very much do without Spike and Illyria as buddy cops, thank you. ("He's a resurrected vampire. She's a resurrected demon-god. They fight crime!")

Thanks!

Wow. No kidding. You'd think D'Artagnan would've noticed when they were in bed. I mean, it was dark, but still. Not to mention Athos...although I was a little unclear on how he could have been married to her for however long without ever seeing her shoulder bare. Or, actually, why you'd be loosening someone's sleeve when they fainted.

Nor have the events of Vingt Ans Plus Tard.

What does happen, anyway? Due to my Dumas issues I've been reluctant to wade through a book usually described as not of his best, and I can't find a Cliff's Notes version. I understand Milady's son is featured as...a nefarious priest? Okay...? Wasn't he supposed to be Lord de Winter's heir? What is he even doing in France? Although I suppose once he was revealed to be illegitimate...boy, is that ever a childhood trauma. "Well, your mother was a spy who was killed by her real husband who you've never heard of which means that even though you're my blood nephew I'm disowning you. Why not look into the Catholic Church as a profession? So you're only five years old. Stiff upper lip, kid."

166,500 = number of flooded buildings in New Orleans, given:

If this distribution of 111 buildings per twenty-fifth square mile is a good sample, 60 square miles will contain approximately 166,500 flooded buildings.

that is all
-r.

The standard rule of "is something prime" that's stated as "it has no factors other than 1 and itself" is a little misleading; after all, I can say that 5 = 2.5 * 2. Really, saying that something is prime depends on what the universe of all numbers is that you're talking about. Normally, when talking about primes we use the positive integers as our universe of all numbers and in that context, "-5 is prime" doesn't make any sense, since -5 is outside the universe.

So what if we say that the universe is all integers. Then, the traditional definition becomes "p has no integer factors other than 1, -1, p, and -p". Or, stated another way that is easier to generalize: "p is such that if you have two numbers multiplying together to give you p, you know that one of them is either 1 or -1."

If I didn't allow for -1, then I'd be able to say that 5 isn't prime because it is (-1)*(-5). And that would be silly. We like having 5 prime.

Note that if you expand your universe of all numbers further, to encompass all rational numbers, you no longer have any primes. Everything (that isn't 0) is a unit. (A unit, in the sense I'm using it here is a number that you can get anywhere from by multiplication, in the sense that there's something out there you can multiply your unit by to get you to any arbitrary result) (porn pun unintended) This turns out to be rather uninteresting.

Far more interesting is if you expand your universe of all numbers only a little bit, so as to include the Gaussian integers. You still get an interesting structure, and some things remain prime (such as 2) but, alas, neither 5 nor 53 remains a prime in that universe. (But 7 is still prime there, so that's good. Maybe I should go with -7 as my favortie prime.)

However, at this point I'll let those that care go find out more by following that link.

"But the best news was that Whedon announced he will be writing a four issue storyline for a new Dark Horse Buffy comic that will take place after the end of Buffy and Angel, and will kick off with the Slayer living in Italy with nasty guy The Immortal. Once Joss’ arc is done he will maintain supervision over the title, something I can’t imagine he will have time for."

Full story here.

I think criticism of her centers around her leading the show to ruin in season 7. Maybe there's something to that, I don't know. I wasn't super-fond of season 7, and I guess to whatever degree she was responsible for that I, sitting here in my living room, disapprove. I'm sure she cares deeply.

My understanding of Noxon's role in the Buffy recipe was that she contributed a lot of the darker elements of the stories, even the ones she didn't personally write. That was one of my favorite aspects of the show--they had the cojones to get truly bleak from time to time.

To be fair, though, even bad Buffy is still better than most other filmed entertainment.

Besides, I was first.

Now, I'm sure there are some of you out there who are on the verge of pointing out that 4 isn't prime, but I must respectfully submit that you're full of crap.

Proof:

1. Consider my dog Mooky Scoots. Dogs, as we all know, have two legs in the back and forelegs in the front. 2+4 = 6.

2. Six is an even number in that it is divisible by two with no remainder. However, I think we're all in agreement that 6 is also a very odd number of legs for a dog.

3. The only number that is both even and odd is infinity. Therefore, by 1 & 2, Mooky has an infinite number of legs.

4. By definition, a prime number is one that is divisible only by one and itself. Because infinity is both even and odd, it can necessarily only be divided by one and itself. It is therefore prime.

5. However, it's easy to show that my dog has only four legs. Q.E.D. here. (Mook is middle right).

6. Therefore, 4==infinity. Because infinity is prime, four is also prime.

On the internet? I rather doubt that. :-) I wrote my first USENET post back in 1985...

But even assuming that it's an unaltered photograph (and we're way into woo-woo land by assuming that) additional legs could be tucked behind the body of the (admittedly adorable) pooch, or even (if small enough) hidden in Mookyums' (sorry, having a Cute attack) fur.

Not to get too metaphysical, but since you attest at (3) that Mooky has an infinite number of legs, it is easy to demonstrate that that many legs could not possibly be simultaneously visible in a photograph; either they would be too small to see (infinitely small, in fact) or the photograph would have to be infinitely large (in fact at least infinity * (minimum visible size of a leg) large) to show them all.

Therefore, QED, some of Mooky's legs are not visible in that finite-sized photograph. But four legs are clearly visible, which in fact proves that Mooky's number of legs ≠ 4!

Alternately, you could define -1 to be prime (though you need to interpret "unique factorization" slightly differently). My understanding is that this is a good idea from a number-theoretic perspective, but a bad one from an algebraic perspective (this should however be taken with a grain of salt, as I am neither an algebraist nor a number theorist).

OK, what the heck IS the fine structure constant? I don't mean the actual number. What's it govern or determine? What things is it a ratio of? Or whatever?

The fine structure constant, usually represented by the Greek letter alpha, is the ratio of the electron chrage squared divided by Planck's constant times the speed of light. It gets its name because it first popped up as an important factor in determining the exact wavelengths of some spectral lines in early quantum models of the atom. These lines are separated by very small amounts relative to the lines of the Balmer series, hence "fine structure."

In a fully quantum theory, alpha turns out to be very important as a measure of (loosely speaking) the relative strength of the electromagnetic interaction between atoms. In quantum electro-dynamics, you treat the forces between charged particles as arising from the exchange of photons in all possible configurations, and each time you add another interaction to your spiffy little Feynman diagrams, you reduce the contribution of that diagram by a factor of 137 and a bit.

This is why the whole Feynman diagram thing works-- alpha is roughly 1/137, so each set of diagrams is something like 1% as important as the previous set (very roughly), and before long, you can ignore them altogether. I think that the calculations of the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron go to about sixth order in alpha, and that calculation goes to twelve or thirteen decimal places.

Kathy Li: 1985? Whippersnapper! (January 1980 (Arpanet) for me, and I expect someone here dates even further back.

I think I am the only person on God's Green Earth to love Firefly and be "meh" on Serenity. It was OK, but no HHGG!

As the definition of "prime" I'm most familiar with is "Any integer [perhaps number] not divisible by any integer other than itself and 1", -5 would indeed be an integer. The highlighted "integer" is necessary, ot any number is a prime, rendering the definition useless.

Yes, but in that sense -5 is the same prime as 5, as their primality is based on the ideal they generate, which is the same prime ideal of the integers. But 5 is the principal representative, just as it is the principle representative of sqrt(5). It's not quite as ambiguous as whether the principle representative of sqrt(-1) is i or -i. There's no way to tell which sqrt(-1) is which.

I think the alternative use of -1 as a prime occurs in some very specialized cases, but I don't remember where. It's a lot narrower than "number theory".

Going all the way back to Dan R's post: I got really excited about primes, their differences, Riemann zeta, interesting properties of primorial numbers, etc. a few years back, until I came across shifted sieve theory and finally understood why no consistent pattern can be found in the primes and the gaps between. I still think there must be a really cool fundamental irrational number in there though, most likely a transcendental number, but I don't have the skills to prove it, or at least not the time.

I look forward to retiring just so I can spend time on stuff like that. Just 30 more years, ahhhhh...

Pat Robertson has just informed Dover, PA (I think the town's name is Dover...) that by voting out the school board which insisted on intelligent design being taught as a scientific theory and an alternative to evolution, they (the voters) have terminally insulted the Almighty, and they might as well stop praying, He won't listen. Oh, and they're headed for disaster. Flood, famine, pestilence, war. Or something like that.

Aargh, grrr. Where's Buffy when we really need her!!

There's an auction of 30,000 comics over at Lot Auctions from a comics pro who's liquidating his entire collection-- daughter going off to college, you know the drill.

Anyway, there are complete runs of Justice League, Vext, Heckler, and other Giffen books. So are a lot of Valiant books, and other things to tempt you with. You can bid on full sets or cherry pick what you're missing. And the opening bids are ridiculously low.

Tempt, tempt. Yes, I'm a horrible enabler, evil pusher, etc. etc. and you knew that already.

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We theorize that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

This makes as much sense as...I can't think of anything that makes that little sense. People do improbably things all the time. No mere mathematical model can predict the behavior of an individual. Even an individual electron is more predictable.

Is there any market any more for back issues of SF magazines?

When I was a lad, after we cleared the basement of mammoths, we lusted after complete runs of Astounding, Galaxy, and many other now-departed (or renamed) publications. Is this no longer the case? I check EBay every now and then, and I checked the site with the comics "lot." Not much if anything there, and prices just above recycled paper.

Does the new generation not collect? Or is there no new generation where SF magazines are concerned?

Mata hari was a famous beauty of an extemely bad reputation, although old and ugly when executed. At her execution members of the firing squad reportedly fainted.

Milady was young and incredibly beautiful, she had furthermore a sexual connection to two of the musketeers. I don't know, maybe I'm a freak, but I'd find it difficult to execute someone I had ever had sex with even if their crimes had been especially great.

Anyhow, I consider these theories explaining the inexplicable supernatural doom of that particular part of the three musketeers pretty damn stupid. Maybe not as bad as Bacon was Shakespeare but definitely stupider than Marcellus Wallace's soul is in the briefcase.

Bryan: I consider these theories explaining the inexplicable supernatural doom of that particular part of the three musketeers pretty damn stupid. Wha? Supernatural doom?

"I do not know, sir, whether Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare. But if he did not, it seems to me he missed the opportunity of his life." -- Someone whose name I can't remember, sadly.

In a Veterans Day speech, Bush offered a forceful defense of the war in Iraq, saying it is the central front in the war on terror and that extremists are trying to establish a radical Muslim empire extending from Spain to Indonesia.

W. TF?

Photos can be found here:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/starstraf/417070.html?#cutid1

More will be posted as I get my (new) camera downloaded.

And the 11-11 and Great war threads started an essay that I'll post a link to once I get it done the way I want (it's so unusual a piece of writing for me that I want it right before I put it out there)

That's the whole 'Al Qaeda Wants To Reestablish The Caliphate' thing.

George really gave that effort a big boost by removing a major obstacle: the Caliphate was based in Baghdad.

With Saddam out of the way, Al Qaeda needn't be stuck out in the boonies of Afghanistan.

“How can I tell?” said D’Artagnan.

“A fleur-de-lis,” said Athos. “She was branded.”

Athos emptied at a single draught the glass he held in his hand.

“Horror!” cried D’Artagnan. “What do you tell me?”

“Truth, my friend. The angel was a demon; the poor young girl had stolen the sacred vessels from a church.”

“And what did the count do?”

“The count was of the highest nobility. He had on his estates the rights of high and low tribunals. He tore the dress of the countess to pieces; he tied her hands behind her, and hanged her on a tree.”

Chapter 27. The Wife Of Athos

Bush has been pushing this idea for a month or so now as the current rationale for our attack on Iraq. The best analysis of this idea that I've seen is at John Roger's Kung Fu Monkey

Highlight:

John: But he's citing that desire as a basis for our strategy. You can't cite your enemy's delusional hopes as a basis for a rational strategy. Goals don't exist in a vacuum, they're linked to capability. David Koresh was utterly committed to being Jesus Christ. See how far that got him.
Either Bush is making strategy based on a delusional goal of his opponent, which is idiotic; or he's saying he believes his opponent has the capability of achieving this delusional goal, which is idiotic. Neither bodes well for the republic.

Tyrone: Reading here, the speech boiled down to two points --

John: Who cares? The Spain-to-Indonesia thing should automatically invalidate the whole speech. I don't care how good your investment advisor is, he can spend three hours reviewing mutual funds, as soon as he says "And of course, we can put your money into the Easter Bunny's Egg Upgrades", he is out of --

The entire post is well worth a read.

(Found via Slacktivist, who cited this post for unrelated but equally brilliant reasons.)

I really must learn to test (or at least proofread) my links.

Maybe Bush is wrong to think that the ambitions of Al Qaeda are even remotely possible. Maybe they are ridiculous. But stranger things have happened.

Yes, and I can think of stranger things that have happened right here in the States.

For one: 50-some-odd million Americans apparently voted for our current government in 2004 - despite their record of disasterous failures in their first term.

it has been some years since I read the three musketeers, and even longer since I read the original articles arguing that there was something fishy about milady but if I recall the fishiness was based around a feeling that the whole disgust at her, in combination with the heightened emotions of her death scene were somehow untrustworthy, that they must have had some other cause in their author's mind than the ostensible cause he gave them, as is the usual case with such second-guessing some cryptic quotes were brought out to bolster the theory.

Well I do think that the death scene is really quite an amazing bit of writing, and in using the phrase supernatural doom I was trying to convey the feeling that the scene gives to me. Nonetheless the theories of whatever extraneous to the book have never managed to dislodge my personal acceptance of the narrative as is.

There was just a commercial for a financial-services company, with their people doing all kinds of Swell Things With Money. We had a young woman, clearly not rich, with a nice guy setting up the lady's first home computer.

Nice Guy: "I'll set the password as your name, okay?"

Cue the creepy music . . .

The movie was ruined, totally ruined, for me by the blatant, anachrositic use of a telephone handset with an RJ-11* type connector on the end of the spiral cord.

Well, not really. A very enjoyable, well done, very well acted film. Just don't go expecting a feel-good movie.

Stefan

* Um, wait, that's not right. An RJ-11 is used to connect the phone to the service; a smaller, similarly shaped connector is used to link the phone to the handset.

One of the amusing bits of Twenty Years After is the point where Dumas admits, albeit as a way of trashing Mazarin(?), that Richelieu was at least a man of suitable scope.

Open thread, 2 things:

Was wondering what would be the correct collective noun for a bunch of books (besides library, that is), and thought of course, the one traditionally used for cats: clowder. I believe it meant clutter. Very appropriate for those of us who never have enough bookcases, and live with piles of books with cats roosting on them.

Also, just thought of this: "Intelligent design — it falsifies science and trivializes faith".

Perhaps in this form: " Falsify Science & trivialize Faith, promote 'intelligent design' ".

(I think I thought of it. If I read it somewhere, it would be somewhere referenced here — please let me know. The high school English teacher always said not to paraphrase in our notes, since we might reparaphrase back to the original in our final draft because it sounded right. No guarantees relying on human memory.)

Am teaching new machine new tricks. Again, WOOT.

http://illusionsetc.blogspot.com/2005/10/recursive-news-optical-illusion.html

Scroll down about one screen to the picture of the woman reading the newspaper on a train.

"Musketeer" is the name of the French special unit.

Each civilization gets a unit that only it can build, which replaces some other generic unit; the special unit is slightly better than the generic. For the Persians, it is Immortals, replacing swordsmen, with I believe 1 more point of attack. The Russians get Cossacks replacing cavalry, the Americans get F16s replacing fighter jets, etc. For the French, it's the Musketeer, which replaces the generic musketman.

Yes. "Cheap." Like that first taste of smack.

There is help, my friend:

CivAnon

I'd to try out google mail, but if I once had a gmail invite, I don't have one now. Does anyone have a spare?

Drop me a line with your address:

Linkmeister@gmail.com

SciFiction is ending after five and a half years of great fiction. I don't think we should let this go without, at the very least, showing our appreciation for the site and the work Ellen Datlow and so many talented writers have done....

By my count there are 320+ stories archived at the site. I'm willing to bet that there are that many SF writers/critics/fans/what have you who have some sort of presence on the web. So I'm thinking, let's all of us write an appreciation of one of the stories.

For the Persians, it is Immortals, replacing swordsmen

Which is odd, as the Immortals were armed with spear and bow, though I imagine they carried swords too.

For the French, it's the Musketeer, which replaces the generic musketman.

... and the French Musketeers (the famous ones at least) were heavy cavalry.

I'm just sayin'.

I hope.

Please.

Mighty Sauros, give me the strength not to look.

that's got to be some sort of crime.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/business/media/16cnd-broadcast.html?hp&ex=1132117200&en=8d0dfed3147b78e2&ei=5094&partner=homepage

For cripes sake, nail the bastard! Threaten him with jail and make him talk!

Forcing Rove to resign, shed his human form, and flee back to Boskonia would make up for a lot.

after a couple of months on jury duty, I'm finally back. Anyone miss me? Don't answer that question. Anyway, I don't know what the karma system is trying to tell me, but it sure does show up in interesting places.

The lesson for you writers out there: it ain't nothing like you see on TV. None of it.

We now return to our regularly scheduled program...

Law and Order: Jury Room?

What I always wondered is, does DA Burger get to prosecute all guaranteed-guilty cases, or do they go to the B-squad prosecutors? The other good question is, what kinda actual you-know evidence do you need for a Murder One indictment in that part of California? (Cue Jack McCoy: "I'm not taking this crap to trial for the same reason I'm not gonna get drunk and drive the BQE at rush hour. I'm gonna end up in a bloody heap if I do.")

Next week on CSI: Barsoom:
"It looks to me like he crashed a flier out in a desolate part of the planet and ran into something adventurous."
"Eighth one today. Anything else?"
"It's a little hard to tell, but my guess is that he's swallowed some kind of critical plot device, but we can't get at it until we find a way to remove these explosive radium bullets."
"Hey, that's only the third time this week."

Surely potato chips are flavored, while crisps are flavoured!

My only acquaintance with trials has been as a witness in a drunk-driving accident. It was actually quite interesting because it was obvious, from comments by one side or the other, that there had been heavy discussions in the judge's chambers and I was just there to give a public account of what I had seen.

Until then though, I had never thought that, in real life, they do not let witnesses hear another person's testimony. Which makes perfect sense.

As fo juries, I've never made it beyond the original notification. I don't expect it'd be something like 12 angry men.

We found the guy guilty, and the judge (who met with us after we'd pronounced our finding) said he'd have found him guilty as well, based on what we saw.

We had 10 people who really wanted to get it right and two dorky Beavis and Butthead kids (although it was before that show came on) who took nothing seriously at all. It reinforced my desire to never do anything which would put me in the hands of a jury.

At some point, I also spotted a relatively straightforward Anubis somewhere in the artist's other galleries, but I'll be darned if I can find him again to point out for Xopher-- however, page five or so of her "Digger" webcomic does have a lovely statue of Ganesh. ("You're the god Ganesh?" "No, I'm a statue of the god Ganesh.")

Oh I know, I've played Civs I, II and III, it just amused me that they'd add that little extra historical touch but not get it quite right.

I think I'll avoid Civ IV: I'm not sure I can stil survive the "It's nearly time to get up, perhaps I should go to bed first" effect.

"...Can electric shock therapy or homeopathic tongue tinglers cure seasickness? Does driving your pickup with the tailgate down save money? Can shoving your fingers into a gun barrel save life? The results may surprise you..."

Or they may not.

And someone who played a villain in Superman ii will show up to rescue Martha Kent. Hmmm... Who could that be? Gene Hackamn doesn't do TV. I don't know what Jack O'Halloran, Valerie Perrine and Sarah Douglas are doing these days. On the other hand, Terrence Stamp has been the voice of Jor-el on this show, so...

And apparently the very drafty Fortress of Solitude will get trashed.

Anyway, my favorite scene in the original L&O was when a defense lawyer asked a forensics expert about an alternate interpretation of the fact:

"Isn't it possible?"

"Yes, it is possible. It's also possible that the victim was killed by a death ray from Mars. It's just not likely."

The 2006 Calendario Romano, otherwise known as the pretty priests calendar, is now available. With new pretty priests!

Oh, come on - they can't all be aimed at gay men!

Strangely enough, on the Hot Priest Calendar page linked above, there is also a completely different gondolier calendar. These guys are mostly dressed, and are perhaps actual gondoliers.

I had no idea the market for religious authority figures and gondoliers was so large!

Wow. I remember thinking that was really cool long before I found out that Don Knuth was Donald Knuth. His first publication, too.

(Anyone up for 43-Man Squamish?)

There have been a couple of sci-fi conventions that have had panels to the effect of "Does romanticized war in fiction make people more likely to support a war in real life because they think real war will be like fictional war?"

The answer, of course, is yes. Romanticized war is always neat and clean. There is no collateral damage, there is no suffering of innocents. I just read somewhere that the helicopter that had been shot down in Somolia and was the basis for "Blackhawk Down" actually landed on and killed a little girl. I don't know if it is true, but it sure didn't make it into the movie.

The corallary is that fictional shows like CSI give a romanticized view, neat and clean, open and shut, view of criminal investigation, and that just isn't reality. Reality is a whole lot messier.

But to say what jury duty IS like is like trying to say what war IS like. I don't know if there is anything I can say in a short post that will give an honest view of either. I'll just say that both are messy, bloody, dirty, boring, exhausting, serious, silly, scary, bureaucratic, and emotionally draining.

One:

Check kiting case. Nitwit young mom bought stuff from Toys "R" Us / Kids "R" Us via bad checks, returned stuff for cash before bad checks had a chance to bounce.

Lots of tedium and minor challenges with every bit of evidence introduced. The defense attourney was all set to cast doubt on every bounced checked. (e.g., was that REALLY her signature?).

There was also to be a challenge to the notion that Toys "R" Us / Kids "R" Us were the same entity. If they were, the crime would be grand larceny since the woman bounced a total of more than $5,000 worth of checks.

She pled out after a week or so.

Two:

DWI/DUI. Middle aged engineer got pulled for driving a bit erattically; police took his keys and license and told him to go home. He returned with an expired out-of-state license and spare keys, made scene at a bar, got stopped again. Refused a breathalator, but the video from the station showed him a bit slosh'd.

This one went through to the bitter end. Given the lack of hard numbers, and the video, I think it would have been fair to give him a DUI, but other jurors forcefully suggested he would have been far more lit up an hour before, when he was actually stopped, so we ended up handing out a DWI.

I was foreman and got the treat of reading off the verdict. Not fun.

The judge and lawyers all grilled us afterwards. I think there was surprise involved. Made me wonder if we'd done the right thing at the time . . . but after reading multiple stories of licenseless drunk drivers killing people, I feel less bad about the likely jail sentence.

I pointed the inconsistency to one cop, who immediately warned his buddies to keep the two guys separate so that they couldn't fake their stories into a consistent tale.

It was late at night, so it's not likely they'd have killed somebody in that spot. But elsewhere? I was never told how that turned out, but I expect the driver got rapped on the knuckles by daddy, big time.

As for Stefan's case, I guess you did the correct thing, since that man was arrested for his second offense, where he was indeed less drunk. Still, I might have wanted to throw the book at him.

The priests seem to be popular with all sorts of people, not least because it's nice art photography even if the models aren't your gender of choice for drooling.

I've been watching a lot of spongebob lately. pure escapism.

Thanks

It's the best fun, and I can think of some people who need fun right now.

Old English for computers

Lots of photos, way cool.

Also, it's possibly the most powerful use of dialogue I've ever witnessed. Watch it from a technical perspective, if not for entertainment.

Oh, and Stefan: a week long trial for bouncing cheques? The murder trial I once watched from the public gallery only took four days!

It was horribly tedious. The defense attourney doggedly questioned everything. The DA was a enthusiastic newbie. There were lots of recesses and late starts.

At several points, the judge rested his chin on his hand and glared at the attourneys. A very sit-commish get ON with it glare.

The most vivid memory of the trial:

I'm standing in the men's room, head out the window to get some air. (The jury room and courtroom were stifling.) Judge comes in, whirls aside his robes (revealing an ordinary looking suit and a pistol in a shoulder holster) and takes a leak while commisserating about the lack of air conditioning.

"If you have used the Fentanyl pain patch and suffered injury or death, call the number below."

While enough Fentanyl will definitely make you a zombie, I presume this also involves having one of those snazzy new phones, like the Motorola Samedi or the Vodafone Vodoun, that feature Post-Volitional Dialing.

The result of the gradual changes that happen to anything that's designed by a committee when exposed to real world pressure to fill a mouse role?

(Allowing for the fact that for everything that manages to evolve, many more things blow up in the committee's faces instead.)

I was on the freeway the other day, and saw a shiny black Cooper Mini with dealer plates that said "Azrael Mini."

That's right, folks, the Angel of Death has a car dealership. Is it weird that I find this endearing? Perhaps Minis have a hyrax-like mind-control Power of Adorable that automatically makes me like anything connected with them. Or maybe it's just because I like imagining a dark angel trying to fold its wings up, as it climbs into the passenger seat for a test drive.

An unwarranted assumption; the parents of some people stupid enough to drive drunk are seriously indulgent and/or willing to believe any cockamamie story about whose fault it really was. At least these idiots were caught; the worst accident I've been in (we were the first of at least 4 cars hit, fortunately with no serious injuries), the occupants left their monster in the growing pool of water from the hydrant that finally stopped them, and the cop on site said they'd probably already reported the car stolen by the time he could call it in.

I've sat just one trial. (I was shortlisted for ~3 others as a consequence of the Massachusetts system, but either got challenged or was deeper on the queue than the number of qualified jurors.) It was almost as tedious as Stefan's even if the courtroom part only lasted a day; half that time, the counsels were conferring with the judge about admissable evidence.

Right next to the Ahura Mazda dealership, no doubt.