bunsen_h

It's the great Time War, the apocalyptic genocidal conflict between the Daleks and the Time Lords.

The Time Lords deploy enormous sofas as shields.  Because, as everyone knows, you're safe from the Daleks if you're hiding behind a sofa.

A few days ago, I saw a d20 among a variety of litter by the truck body that the local Value Village uses to store their wares behind the store.  While I was toying with it, I noticed a thing that struck me as odd: the pairs of opposite faces didn't add up to 21.  Almost invariably, with a regular 6-sided die, the opposite faces add to 7: 6 opposite 1, 5 opposite 2, 4 opposite 3.

When I looked at my gaming dice, though, I found that my current d8, d10s, and d12 also don't have the faces paired.  I'd always just assumed that they would, out of some kind of symmetry.  A few years back when I was looking into the possibility of turning mineral crystals into dice and plotting how the faces of a 12-sided garnetohedron should be arranged, I ran a mathematical model to distribute the values around the surface so trying to roll to get a high or low result wouldn't be effective.  That model assumed that the faces would be paired.

Obviously, one could do that kind of optimization without assuming the pairing.  But the d20 I found clearly hasn't done that either.  There's clustering of the low- and high-valued faces.  My old dice also don't seem to have done anything like that.

I guess it's just been an assumption I've been making for decades, without troubling to check.

Seen recently behind a strip mall near my home:



Striking a Canada goose with a vehicle is probably not enough to destroy the vehicle, of itself. But when a Canada goose is harmed, it releases pheromones that cause the rest of its swarm to aggressively attack anything that moves in the area.

Just across my screen: an ad urging me to "rewrite documents real quick with Adobe AI".

I think I can manage to generate illiterate English by myself if I need to, without assistance, thank you.  But it's good to know what I could expect from Adobe "AI".

The Rapture really happened a month ago, just as many had foretold.  But as soon as the people disappeared, so too did all physical evidence of their ever having existed, and all memories of them.  All of the catastrophic damage that resulted from the vanishing of machine operators, vehicle drivers, controllers of generating stations, etc. was erased.  It's just as though a massive alien invasion occurred and then ended.  Everyone left behind now believes that the whole thing was merely a mass delusion.

A little while ago, I encountered a nice rendition of the old folk song "Leave Her Johnny".  It reminded me of my own one-verse filk:

I heard old Archimedes say,
"Lever, Johnny, lever
With a place to stand I could move the world
If I only had a lever"

When I look up the quotation on-line, the comments are mostly about the need for a lever of astronomical scale.  But technically, that's not true.  A lever of any size will do, and the fulcrum can be on the Earth's surface.  Any shifting of mass, even mass that's part of the Earth as a whole, will affect the planet's moment of inertia and how it rotates.  It's just that when we're talking about the kinds of masses common in our lives, the changes will be tiny and undetectable.  The changes are inversely proportional to the ratio between the mass of the stuff being shifted and the mass of the rest of the planet.

Though seismological stations have to be set up in such a way that vibrations from local events are cancelled out.  That stuff also moves the world... a little.

Yesterday evening, someone a block or two north of my home was setting off a bunch of fireworks for Canada Day.  I got a decent show, watching from my driveway, appearing over my neighbor's home across the street.

While I was out there, I could see a fair number of fireflies flickering around my yard and across the street.  Perhaps there is some benefit to having one of the most unkempt lawns on my block.

"I'm not alone with my thoughts.  They're alone with me."

This came to me at the memorial service for the mother of an old friend, during the music that opened the ceremony.  Most of the people in the pews around me were in groups, talking quietly amongst themselves.

I just voted in the provincial election.  There was a concerning incident.

The way it's supposed to work is that one brings one's marked ballot in a privacy sleeve to the person who's running the ballot scanner.  That person inserts the ballot-in-sleeve part way into a slot in the scanner.  The scanner plucks the ballot out of the sleeve.  The operator then puts the sleeve away, I assume for reuse.

The operator was having trouble getting the scanner to take in the ballots.  It looked like an alignment problem: the ballot-in-sleeve had to be inserted quite precisely, or the scanner would pull the ballot in part way, then go into reverse and push the ballot out again.  The operator knew that this was a recurring problem.  But she took the sleeve away before the ballot had been processed, so when the scanner went into reverse, my ballot was almost completely exposed to view.  My vote was visible to the operator.  She put the ballot back into the sleeve and went through the process again, and after a couple more tries, the job was completed.

I reported the problem to the polling-place supervisor.  She said that she would make an incident report.  She assured me that only the person who'd issued the ballot to me knew my name, and that the machine operator had no way to connect my identity with my vote.  I pointed out that if she'd already known me personally, that wouldn't help.  The problem wouldn't have occurred at all if only she'd waited to take the sleeve away until the ballot had been fully processed.  It was while I was walking home that it occurred to me that I am, in my own way, fairly distinctive.  People tend to remember me.  There aren't a lot of really short men walking around wearing octopus hats.

My cell phone is new enough, and little enough used, that I have thus far received only three spam messages.  The second and third were both from Doug Ford, asking for my support.  Different phone numbers, presumably to avoid being blocked.  This time, I replied, calling him/them out for the sleazy practice.  And told him to go join his family... specifically Rob.

A couple of hours ago, a canvasser for the local federal PC candidate was at my door.  We aren't even in an election yet!  I told him that both I and my wife struggle daily with the long-term effects of the Conservatives' policies on our social welfare system.  That they are evil.  I don't know if it made any lasting impression on him, but I can hope.  I was in my bathrobe and looked haggard, from an extremely late night with the worst neuropathic pain that I can remember experiencing.  It felt like someone kept jabbing a large needle into my upper left thigh, and using a taser on my lower right thigh about once per minute, for hours.  I wouldn't have had so much essentially-permanent nerve damage if there hadn't been multiple delays in the surgery, resulting from hospital wards being temporarily closed because of (1) financial shortfalls, and (2) too few doctors and nurses.