The Windkey and the Lamplighter

At the bottom of a stairwell in Wean Hall, Carnegie-Mellon’s Computer Science building:

130
My office lights are nothing like the sun
Which from my inner office I can’t see
It’s not Ra’s light by which my work is done
Instead, fluorescent gods shine down on me

It continued for an entire sonnet. The concluding couplet mourns the coming of Gates Hall and the demise of Wean. At the very end, in pale small type, it said 7284d24149ad7ee0aded5e57dce8213f. I wonder why.

I’ve been playing an addictive CCG on Facebook, called PackRat. It’s a lot of fun—steal/trade cards from people who are listed as your friends on Facebook (all trades are “stealing”, where your success in stealing the card you want depends on the card you’re dropping.) and make sets, or buy cards from the marketplace, which is shared with all players.

The game, however, is not what has my attention right now. It’s the ads.
Facebook advertisers appear to have my age, gender, and location (based on my net connection—when I was behind a firewall that connected in LA, I suddenly got LA-centric ads instead of Boston-centric ones.) as well as potentially other data. So, what do Facebook’s advertisers think of me?

They think:

• I want to learn Spanish. (Seriously. “26 year old girls are learning Spanish”)
• I want an MBA (possibly from Dubai)
• I may want to earn money from home answering surveys.
• I care if I have a “celebrity twin”
• I may have bad credit or be in debt or want new credit cards.
• I enjoy online auctions for gadgets or jewelry
• I either have small children or am otherwise interested in “frilly diaper covers”

I think I’m glad I’m not the person Facebook’s advertisers think I am.

I’ve now tried three times for sour hard candy, and since I’ve twice made the same mistake, I think I know what it is: Despite the citric acid being a crystalline ingredient, I should really be adding it once the sugar has reached ~310F/160C.

The first time I thought I’d just used far, far too much citric acid. (Which I had. The face one of my guests made when she tried it, even after being warned that it was not fit for consumption by those over the age of 14, was enough to cause another guest to get out *her* camera.)

The second time, though, I used rather less (still too much) and had the same issue—browning of the candy at ~250F. More online research suggests I should add the acid and any flavors after the candy has been removed from the heat. Guess I’ll try that next time.

Edit: I tasted the results this morning. Totally burnt. I’ll try tonight adding the flavor after getting the sugar to hard-crack.

Meanwhile, pictures.

Emily at the Planetary Society has the news:
Water ice on Mars!

They’re pretty sure it’s ice, and they’re pretty sure it’s water—carbon dioxide ice would have melted more quickly at the temperatures they’ve been observing.

This is very cool. Ice on Mars!

Rainbow in Sudbury

Originally uploaded by katsniffen

Little bits of beauty in the midst of suburban desolation make commuting bearable. I pulled into a parking lot to take this one.

Schmap has my picture of Dockweiler State Beach in Los Angeles!
(They sent me a note on Flickr telling me they used it.)

This is what Creative Commons licenses are for. Unfortunately, some people are unhappy with having allowed commercial use—Virgin Mobile in Australia is using Flickr photos in an ad campaign that portrays some of the subjects rather poorly. They’re attributing, but they didn’t contact any of the photographers or anything. Some of the subjects are quite upset, like this girl. I suspect I’d be upset, too.

The Associated Press’ pay-for-quoting scheme is the most amazing profiteering I’ve seen in quite a while. Their system requests that you pay for quotes as short as five words, and their terms include a statement that AP “reserves the right to terminate this Agreement at any time if Publisher or its agents finds Your use of the licensed Content to be offensive and/or damaging to Publisher’s reputation.”

Sorry, guys, that doesn’t work.

From section 107 of Title 17, US Code (sheet 5 of the link)
“the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other
means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism,
comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple
copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is
not an infringement of copyright”

That sounds pretty clear to me. AP is bullying people for money.

Hat tips to BoingBoing and MakingLight

I bought D&D4 today. I skimmed the books this afternoon, and found a few neat features: multiclassing is mostly out. Chaotic Good, True Neutral, and Lawful Evil are out. LG, G, E, and CE are the remaining alignments. Unaligned characters are allowed. Skills are binary: Trained or untrained. All characters have a BAB progression (in 3E terms) of 1/2. That is, you roll d20+Level/2+StrengthBonus to hit. You hit if you beat their 10+Armor+Level/2. Saving throws work similarly, and touch-like attacks are now simply vs. Reflex instead of vs. AC. Grappling is greatly simplified. Attacks of opportunity are greatly simplified, while retraining the ability for a character to control some territory.

Rolling of stats is strongly discouraged. Most characters are expected to have stats of 16/14/13/12/11/10. There’s a point-build system that can’t actually create that mix; the closest it comes is 16/15/13/12/11/10.

It took me about an hour to duplicate Belkar Bitterleaf. I did make him a pure Rogue, though. There’s plenty of choice involved in a first level character: race and class, stat allocation, one feat from a list of a few dozen, four skills from a list of twenty or so, a class style (strong rogue or sneaky rogue, in this case), two at-will powers (your basic attacks), a once/encounter power, and a once/day power. Equipment finishes off the character and he’s ready to play.

I suspect that I could bang out an adventuring party in about two hours total, assuming everybody had read the book or played previous incarnations of D&D. That would leave a few hours for a sample adventure.

Update: Also, prestige classes are mostly gone: you have a general class levels 1-10, a focused class within the base cloass 11-20, and an Epic Destiny not-necessarily-related to your class from 21-30. That Epic Destiny includes an ascension/immortality/endgame scenario.

Two downsides: First, there is no simple option. You can’t just hand someone a Barbarian and tell them to Rage in combat. Every class has spells, powers, or something else to pick.

Second, a bunch of old favorites are gone. I didn’t see “Magic Circle against Whatever” here, or really any domination/mind-control powers at all. I may find them on a deeper reading, but there’s definitely a reduction to one plane of effect. That will dramatically simplify the strategy, but the tactical game may work out OK.

You may already know that Warren Ellis decided to make a webcomic. But he decided that a few panels per day wasn’t enough to tell a story chunk. Being Warren Ellis, he decided to do six pages at a chunk. He’s seventeen six-page installments in at http://www.freakangels.com/. It’s about as safe for work as Warren Ellis could get.

(ht: Daily Illuminator)

Despondent at the news that not only did Hershey buy Jolly Rancher, but they closed the Wheat Ridge factory and got rid of Lemon Jolly Ranchers, I decided to create my own candy.

I got some Lime Oil from my local confectioner (who happened to have some that needed using soon) and combined a tablespoon of it with four cups of sugar, half a cup of water, and an eighth teaspoon of cream of tartar.

The resulting candy was hard-crack when I took it off the heat—both the thermometer and the cold water test indicated so—but when I poured it into the paper “moulds” (greased baking cups and some paper plates when those ran out) it crystallized a bit. It *was* hard-crack, though, since the drops on the stove and the table were perfect little clear drops. Next time I will go buy some parchment paper and grease it more, and then drop the candy by small spoonfuls onto the paper, so I get proper lozenges. At least now I know that it’s not sour enough, and I want some citric acid to add. We stuck some small cookie cutters in the soft candy as it cooled—I will probably try that again. I think it also needs either more lime or more citric acid—or both!