Entertainment/Culture
Family Feud Basra Style
Gunfire is pretty common here, perhaps even more common than in Oakland though usually for the same reasons: celebrating holidays, sports victories, weddings, that sort of stuff. It is kind of fun to listen to and watch tracers and stuff, but usually the villa is also celebrating in an obvious way; when you hear gunfire you also hear cheers, at least at night.
This evening the house was quiet, but the gunfire sure wasn’t. The guys tell me it was a tribal feud in the neighborhood, quite close from the sound of it. This is a low-fi recording from my phone.
Futurama is Awesome
I learned two things about Futurama recently which added to my already deep appreciation for the show. The first is that the theme song came from a very cool song by Pierre Henry called Psyche Rock from 1967, which is on youtube. It was remixed by Fatboy Slim in an appealing way.
But what was most interesting recently was to see episode 10 of season 6, the Prisoner of Benda, a spoof of the Prisoner of Zelda but including what may be the first tv-episode publication of the proof of a relatively complex mathematical theorem in group theory as a core plot element.
The problem in the plot is that the Professor’s mind swapping machine creates an immune response which prevents swapping back in one step. So how do you get everyone back to into their original bodies? Well, as Sweet Clyde says, it takes at most two extra players [who haven’t swapped yet]. As the entire cast, including the robo-bucket, have swapped bodies, the situation is pretty complex, but fortunately one of the show’s writers, Ken Keeler, has a PhD in applied mathematics from Harvard and found a proof, which is actually shown in the show (above), and then worked in a fast montage that restores everyone.
In the following table, the heading shows the character name of the body, row 0 shows the occupant of that body by the end of the plot’s permutations and before the globetrotters start the transformations. Rows 1-7 show the steps to restore everyone to their original bodies. Each transformation was animated as a pair using the two “extra players” except the last rotation to restore Sweet Clyde and the Bucket.
Halloween at Borgo a Mozzano
Borgo a Mozzano hosts the biggest Halloween festival in Italy and this year was the biggest yet. The streets were so packed with people it was almost impossible to move in some places. There were at least 8 stages, each hosting several different bands through the night playing all sorts of music from heavy metal to gypsy punk to polka, but one of the best was the marching band which had our town butcher out dancing with a cows head.
Google Maps, now with billboards
This is the first I’ve noticed location-specific ads being inserted into a google search. It makes sense that their map becomes a revenue source. If the ads don’t work, the the map will go away. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Rebuilding is Complete
I wish to thank everyone for their support in this brief moment of crisis.
