malvasia bianca

We went to see Howl’s Moving Castle last weekend. Actually, Liesl and I went the weekend before that, to make sure it was okay for Miranda; we decided that it probably was, though we checked first with Miranda to make sure.

We all enjoyed it, though I don’t think it will end up as one of my favorite Miyazaki movies. One thing that struck me: while I have nothing against love stories, they’re all about falling in love instead of loving people. I don’t have any plans to ever do the former again. while the latter is a huge aspect of my life. And while the move had its love story aspects, they were muted, and even explicitly questioned at the end. Instead, the relationship aspects of the movie focused on building a family, something very dear to my heart. And quite a family it was, too: I really like the “collection of misfits banding together” trope, families as a group of people who have made an active choice to stay together. (This was something I really liked about the third volume of the Kushiel trilogy, too.)

On a related note, we watched Shrek 2 on DVD this weekend. It has a little bit of the “actively chosen family” theme in it. But it’s also about two people reaffirming that they are very much in love; I for one cried at the end of it. Again, Kushiel does this, in the second volume instead.

Prompted by Knuth’s delightful article “The Errors of TeX”, I just read his collection Literate Programming. (Which contains the aforementioned article, among others.) A fascinating read, for multiple reasons: Knuth is a really smart guy, whose opinions I very much respect, but he’s writing from a context that I frequently find very hard to understand.

The most dramatic example of this is the first article, “Structured Programming with go to Statements”. It was written in 1974, three years after I was born, and I never learned Algol 60 (which I think is more or less the language that the article uses). I understand that goto once was used much more, and I can imagine a world in which people had yet to decide that a few iteration constructs (for, while, and the occasional (in my experience very occasional) do…while), combined with a sprinkling of break and continue, were good enough for 99.9 percent of your needs. And while I suspect that some of the other solutions he discusses (Zahn’s iteration constructs) are too complicated to be a part of a well-designed programming language, I can imagine an alternate history in which they would have a more prominent role.

But what I can’t imagine is a world without functions, yet that seems to be the world that this paper was written in. Did programming languages of the time really not have functions? (Certainly some of them did.) Or did they have functions but only allow a single exit from those functions, in which case they were irrelevant to the question at hand? That must have been the case, but I still find it hard to wrap my brain around. Compiler technology must have played a big role, too: the article is very concerned with optimization, and I doubt compilers were too good at inlining at the time.

So I felt like I was in bizarro world when I was reading the article. But it’s always fun reading visiting other worlds, and there were some hints of worlds that are dear to my heart in the article. At the end, he hints at object-oriented programming (or at least modules). Much more interestingly, earlier in the article he discusses the possibility of automated refactoring tools (without using the term “refactoring”, of course). But the use he proposes for those tools is completely different than the current uses of those tools: these days, we want to apply behavior-preserving transformations to our code in order to make it clearer, while Knuth wanted to start from clear code and apply behavior-preserving transformations to make the code less clear, but more optimized!

A decade later come the articles on literate programming. I knew that this was a way to embed source code and a description of what the code does in a same file, to enable you to present a nicely-typeset, richly-commented version of the code. I hadn’t realized quite how lengthy the comments were that Knuth proposed, however; I also hadn’t realized that literate programming divides code up into fragments that can be portions of functions, instead of entire functions.

At least functions play more of a role here than in the earlier paper. But they still don’t play enough of a role. Over and over again, I had to ask: why aren’t these fragments of code functions in their own right? There are probably a few answers to this. For one, I suspect that short functions still weren’t in the air much at the time. For another thing, I suspect that compiler and programming language support for inlining wasn’t very good, so it would have been an unacceptable performance hit. And a third thing is that the code fragments wouldn’t have always worked on their own because they referred to variables external to the code fragment: you need objects for that style of programming to come into its glory.

So it’s pretty amazing to see how Knuth comes towards modern best practices without modern programming languages and tools. And it’s embarrassing to realize that Knuth probably understood the need for Compose Method two decades ago better than I do now. He has also responded to my objects to the paper I discussed above: his literate programming discussions are in the context of Pascal, which apparently doesn’t allow multiple exits from a function, so Knuth provides a return macro to get the same effect (using goto).

[Side note: I never learned Pascal, for no particular reason. (I’m the right age to have learned it, but I was cool enough to jump straight to C. Or something.) I was aware of its pointless procedure/function distinction; I was not aware that it distinguished between calculating the return value for a function and actually returning from a function. Weird.]

Getting back to the “literate” part of literate programming, the length and quality of exposition of the comments in the code samples that are given is pretty stunning. Looking at this through XP glasses, I suspect that the comments are rather too long (too many artifacts not pulling their weight), but it would be interesting to try it out once or twice. (At the very least, I should get around to reading TeX: The Program: it’s only been sitting on my bookshelf for a decade and a half by now…) My first reaction was that lengthy comments could be good for presenting a finished, polished program to the outside world, but not so great for a live program that is constantly being modified, because the comments are an extra burden and could get out of date too easily: far better to spend your time on making the code itself clear. But, in “The Errors of TeX”, Knuth talks about how the comments made it much easier for him to perform some serious surgeries on the code, so I could easily be wrong there.

Some more cultural shifts that you see in the book: at the start of the book, he’s talking seriously about mathematical correctness proofs of programs. By the time he gets to “The Errors of TeX”, though, he’s using test input to exercise every aspect of his code. A big improvement; personally, I’d rather lean more on unit tests, but he’s working in a context where that isn’t so realistic. Also, data structures sure have changed over the years. When I think of, say, a binary tree, I think of a node as being represented by a chunk of memory with two pointers and a data value in it. But in this book, a binary tree is three global arrays (data, left, and right), with a node being an index into those arrays. (So many global variables!)

I’m definitely putting more of his books on my “to read” list.

I’ve thought a bit more about the whole strategy of the weak thing. In some sense, actually, the DoD’s analysis is reasonably on-target. The analogy here is to think of the US as a bully: we’re the biggest, strongest kid in the school, and we have no compunctions about beating up people who are substantially less powerful than us (in various ways, not necessarily strictly militarily ones) if we can see short-term benefits in that.

And, of course, it’s natural for a bully to dismiss those less powerful people who won’t meet him on his own terms as “the weak”. There are various strategies that weaker kids can employ against bullies: banding together with other kids (international fora), telling the teacher (judicial processes), or feeding antifreeze to their dogs (terrorism). From this point of view, the DoD’s analysis actually looks pretty good, though the tone could use some work.

But there’s still a serious problem: it says “a strategy of the weak”, not “strategies of the weak”. And this linkage doesn’t work in the real world or in the analogy: the kid feeding antifreeze to the dog is not the kid telling the teacher, and if Osama bin Laden is complaining to the International Criminal Court, I haven’t heard about it. Pretending that these are all part of one strategy is, well, obscene.

From a DoD policy paper:

Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.

Like Scott Rosenberg, I am appalled. Several years, I came to the conclusion that the term “terrorist” was almost never a helpful one, but this linkage of it with international fora and judicial processes is simply obscene.

Whenever I go to Europe, I’m happy that the coins reach higher denominations there than in the US: it seems to work pretty well. The thing is, though, I’m not sure that it would work well in the US: my change purse is always a lot fuller than my wallet, and I’m not sure that shifting dollars from the latter to the former would be a good idea.

There are a couple of factors at work that I can identify. For one thing, if they want to charge two euros for something, they change two euros, not some ridiculous price like €1.95 or €1.99. And, for another thing, the list price includes the sales price. Works much better; I acquired almost no 1- and 2-cent coins until we went to a pastry shop that was out of 5- and 10-cent coins.

(Though there is an unfortunate flip side to this: the ATM machines loved giving out 50-euro bills. I wish I could remember the machine that only gave out twenties…)

This was the first trip where we didn’t have to use a single traveler’s check; yay for global networks. We might have used one in the airport, since the ATM there didn’t like our cards, but the rates the change bureau there charged were obscene: convenience is one thing, but not at the expense of a ten percent premium. So we didn’t worry about spending all of our money: that way, the next time we go to Europe, it’ll be easier to get out of the airport.

Bonny Doon is the best.

When in Paris, I read the International Herald Tribune daily. Which was a change of pace: it’s been years since I regularly read any paper other than the Mercury News regularly. (In particular, it’s been a while since I’ve read the New York Times regularly; I read several news magazines regularly, but just the one newspaper.)

And, all things considered, it was a pleasant change of pace. Like all newspapers, it has its target audience, and in some ways I would seem to be not too bad a fit for it: I’ve spent enough time with people who don’t seriously consider any newspaper other than the (New York) Times, and I’m happy with the more international skew on the news that the IHT gives. (To the former point, I would say that I still think it’s weird that the only newspaper that Stanford’s math department subscribes to is the Times: why not the Mercury News or the SF Chronicle? Except that I don’t think that it’s weird at all: academia works very hard to break down loyalty to physical locations, to make you loyal to your discipline as opposed to any other grouping you might be part of, so it’s not so surprising that people are loyal to the paper that does the best job of presenting itself as the paper for the intelligentsia. On a more prosaic note, lots of people who pass through the math department are from elsewhere, so the Times is more likely to be familiar to them than other papers; people who aren’t transient are likely to subscribe to a local paper at home.)

There were times, however, when I would realize that I wasn’t quite the target audience after all. When it moved away from political news, there were a lot more articles on high-end fashion than on baseball, for example. The longest obituary while I was there was about some New York socialite whom I’d never heard of and couldn’t see any reason why I should care about. Even some articles along those lines were vaguely interesting to me, though: I liked the article talking about how you could buy a French chateau for only 700,000 Euros (a lot cheapter than chateaus in Mountain View, that’s for sure), and the weekly opera advertising section amused me.

And then the bombing came, which I should probably devote a separate blog entry to, but whatever. I’m glad I had my vacation in Paris instead of London, though we would have been just waking up at the time of the bombings anyways. George Bush is a liar and asshole. Yes, the bombings are horrible; twisting them for your own political ends is not the correct response. “And the contrast couldn’t be clearer between the intentions and the hearts of those of us who care deeply about human rights and human liberty, and those who kill, those who’ve got such evil in their heart that they will take the lives of innocent folks.” Sure, not a single innocent Iraqi has been killed by US forces, right. Of course, our only motivations for our foreign policy are human rights and human liberty, how could anybody think otherwise? But these comparisons are beyond the pale, in the IHT just as much as in Bush’s brain.

Several other columnists were also happy to use the terrorists’ actions for their own ends: in particular, there were digs at Spain for electing an anti-war government after its bombings, claiming that that’s morally wrong because it’s doing what the terrorists want. Sure, if you don’t know whether doing X or Y is a good idea, then doing the one that terrorists don’t want you to do is probably a good strategy. But if you are sure that one of them is better, then changing your mind because a terrorist agrees with you is only marginally more sensible than changing your mind because a terrorist disagrees with you.

It was very pleasant reading the International Herald Tribune every day (except Sundays) over our vacation, and watching the A’s get closer and closer to .500, and finally reach it. (It would have been nice if they’d given baseball a bit more space in their sports section, though; ah well.)

And then we got home, and the annoying all-star break hit. Sigh. But that’s over now, and wow, what a game for Rich Harden. I’m not surprised to see him throw a shutout, but a two-hitter where he was perfect through seven innings is great, and an 81-pitch complete game is stunning.

I still don’t think they’re going to make the playoffs, but I’m a lot less confident of that than I was. (Ditto for the Indians.)

A couple of trips to Paris ago, Liesl and I discovered the joys of raclette. We had it at a restaurant (attached to a cheese shop) called the Ferme Saint-Hubert; they gave us this huge chunk of cheese, stuck it on a rack with a heating element, gave us some meats and potatoes, and told us to scrape the cheese onto the meats and potatoes as it melted. Which we did; it tasted great, and was quite the sybaritic experience.

So we went back there again on our last trip to Paris; we also tried raclette at another restaurant, but that melted it themselves in the kitchen, so it wasn’t as much fun. We’ve since bought a tabletop grill that can be used as a raclette maker: not the same experience, since you slice the cheese up in advance instead of putting a heating element next to a half-wheel of cheese, but it tastes just as good, and is probably our favorite thing to serve when we have guests over. (Easy and impressive.) We buy the cheese at the excellent milk pail market (honestly, that store is one of the main reasons why we wanted to stay in Mountain View); for what it’s worth, I have a slight preference for French raclette over Swiss raclette, but you can get them both there.

So, of course, we wanted to go back to the Ferme Saint-Hubert again on this trip. But, alas, it had closed: a restaurant specializing in truffles had replaced it. Unfortunate, but it actually led to our most pleasant food discovery of the trip: down the street was a bistro called the Ferme des Mathurins, with very friendly staff, stunning mozzarella, and a quite interesting 1998 white wine (whose name I’ve forgotten) that tasted rather sherry-like and was the yellowest wine I’ve ever seen.

All was not lost, however: our trusty copy of The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris listed several other places where we could get raclette. (It’s about 10 years old, not even the most recent edition of the book, so not too surprising that one restaurant listed in it was closed.) So a couple of nights later, we tried another cheese restaurant. But it had closed, too! Fortunately, another candidate was within (lengthy) walking distance of that one, so we walked there: closed as well. Sigh; we gave up, and had a decent meal at a brasserie nearby.

So we tried another one a day or too later, and our luck continued: four cheese shops out of business. The one thing we most wanted to eat in Paris, and we couldn’t get it. Actually, that’s not quite true: in the den of cheap restaurants near the boulevards St. Michel and St. Germain, there were four restaurants serving raclette; after the aforementioned failures, we tried one of them, and while they did have a tabletop grill, I wouldn’t have guessed that the cheese was raclette if you hadn’t told me.

Oh well; we did have quite a bit of good food on the trip.

Incidentally, we did go out for Japanese food a couple of times, at Miranda’s request. One restaurant was quite good: lovely decor (including some of the serving dishes), some very interesting dishes, and stunning toro. In general, though, the sushi there seems worse than what we can get around here: in particular, the salmon just wasn’t as good as the stuff we get around here, and neither restaurant had flying fish eggs (Miranda’s favorite sushi). At least one of the restaurants (we didn’t check the other), didn’t have any edamame, either, which surprised me.

Museum restaurant guide: the Picasso museum has surprisingly good food, and the restaurant on the top floor of the Pompidou center is quite nice.

Just got back from vacation; I trust that my weeks of silence didn’t cause any distress to my legions of loyal fans. We spent a couple of weeks in Paris; our first vacation since our honeymoon that didn’t involve visiting relatives. (This is what happens when one has a child.)

Loads of fun; I will post more about it over the next week, I expect. Miranda continued to maintain her status as perfect in every way, and a thorough delight to travel with. I wasn’t surprised that she did great in restaurants; I honestly was a little surprised at her museum stamina. We got a good look at almost all of the ground floor of the Musee D’Orsay (I become more of a Manet fan every visit), and even a not-insignificant chunk of the Louvre. Weird traffic patterns there – in particular, why is the lovely covered statue courtyard that they created a decade or so ago on the north side so sparsely populated? Miranda liked it, too: because of the Disney Hercules movie, she wanted capsule explanations of all of the statues of Greek figures.

Miranda’s been taking dance lessons for the last year. Actually, for longer than that – they offered dance lessons at her preschool, so she took them there. She liked it enough to want to continue it this year, but it hasn’t been her favorite activity, so we’re not planning to continue it any more. But her school had a dance recital last weekend, which of course she wanted to participate in. So we went to that.

And it was a lot of fun! Her class is pleasant enough, but ultimately it’s a bunch of 5- and 6-year olds who aren’t the most focused people in the world. And the other classes at the same time are at not very advanced skill levels as well. So, while I was aware that there was a wide range of classes available at the school, I hadn’t really seen them.

But it was pretty cool seeing maybe 30 different classes show their stuff. There were several classes at or near Miranda’s level, but they were at all at least cute. And the kids definitely got better as they got older; the high-school-age kids seemed to me quite good. A whole range of dance styles, too. They mixed it up nicely (both in terms of ability and style), lots of different costumes, and they kept it moving quite briskly.

It didn’t change our mind on her continuing the lessons in the fall (nothing against the school, it just doesn’t seem to be her thing), but it was a nice final experience with the school.

The A’s are continuing to do pleasantly well: they haven’t gone on a huge win streak or anything, but they’re winning almost every series these days. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by Bobby Crosby’s return; call me a pessimist, but even though he was rookie of the year last year, he only batted .239 last year, and sophomore slumps are far from rare, so I wasn’t expecting much from him this year. But his line this season is .313/.370/.507, which is great.

I’m still not thrilled about the Tim Hudson trade, but the Mark Mulder trade is turning out nicely so far: Mulder has an ERA of 4.27 (in the NL), while Danny Haren has settled down after an iffy start with an ERA of 3.98. Keeping Barry Zito still doesn’t look too good, but the younger arms seem to be living up to their billing. I have a hard time imagining we’ll make the playoffs this year, but as rebuilding years go, not too bad.

And Julio Franco, not content to rest on his laurels, followed up his two-steal game with a two-homer game. Doubtless inspired by his example, the Indians are doing great; I doubt they’ll catch the White Sox, but a wildcard berth isn’t completely out of the question.

The computer’s memory problems seem to have settled down: I’m not convinced that everything is right, but it’s stopped crashing now that I’m only using one DIMM. (And 256 MB seems to be right on the borderline of where swapping starts happening, so I’ve ordered a 512 MB DIMM.) But now I’m having networking problems, which I’m not sure are my fault. Sometimes my internet connection temporarily disappears, which might be the fault of the computer, the ethernet cable, the cable modem, or something else, and I have no clue as to which of those it is. “Something else” isn’t completely crazy: I got assigned IP addresses a couple of times last week that makes me think that one of my neighbors is running a misconfigured DHCP server. If the problems continue, maybe I’ll bring in a laptop and ethernet cable from work to try to eliminate some of the variables.

Incidentally, one more thing about Nausicaa: in the comic books, the big bugs are called “Ohmu”, while in the movie their name is pronounced “Om”. Is “ohmu” how Om (as in Om mani padme hum) gets transliterated into Japanese? I would believe that. Also, is there any significant difference between the new edition of the comic books and the older, four-volume edition? Nothing leaps out to me (other than the color of the ink), but I haven’t compared them carefully.

Yesterday was a good day for Indians of my youth. Julio Franco, 46 years old, an age normally reserved for knuckleballers and the occasional freak lefty reliever, went two for five with two steals. And the comparatively spritely Omar Vizquel, a 38-year-old babe in arms, went five for six, with a double and a triple, and is batting .302 for the season.

We watched Nausicaa for the first time a week or two ago. At first, I wasn’t too impressed: even before watching it, I’d already half made up my mind that I wouldn’t like it as much as Miyazaki’s other movies, because of comparisons with other works of his: the manga version of Nausicaa is much more elaborate than the movie, and Miyazaki had revisited environmental themes in other, later movies (Castle in the Sky, I should watch that one again, and Princess Mononoke). So I figured it would be a sort of journeyman work with interesting ideas that ultimately didn’t get their due.

And when I started watching it, my opinions started to solidify: the animation is pretty basic compared to his later work, and the idea of forests and insects evolving in order to clean the world for humans makes me roll my eyes. But somehow, by the end of the movie, I found myself really enjoying it. And Miranda has watched it twice since then, and I’ve been perfectly happy to be in the room with it on.

I think what’s going on is that I’m a sucker for big picture mysticism, driven by charismatic leaders. (Not by any means all charismatic leaders, but Nausicaa certainly qualifies for me.) Castle in the Sky, if memory serves me well, had some neat ideas and pleasant characters, but was lacking on those fronts; Princess Mononoke did better, but wasn’t as simplistically optimistic as Nausicaa. (Optimistic probably isn’t the right word, but I’m not thinking of a better substitute right now.) Don’t get me wrong, I don’t advocate simplistic works in general, but sometimes they have a certain purity which can tweak me in happy spots.

All things considered, I’d probably rather be watching Princess Mononoke, but it was a pleasant surprise given the way my opinions towards Nausicaa had begun. Good thing, too, given that Miranda is way too young for Mononoke, and right now wants to watch Nausicaa every few days.

Yesterday was the last day of Kindergarten. Very sad (well, not very sad, but certainly poignant): no more Wednesday mornings in classrooms, I won’t see the other kids and parents for a few months, and even once next year starts, I won’t see the current first-graders much at all. And Sue Lampkin, Miranda’s fabulous teacher, is retiring. Sigh. I can’t say I’m thrilled about having to make Miranda’s lunch every morning over the summer, either, though not having to get out of the door early on Thursdays will be nice.

At least PACT manages to ease the blow: Miranda’s brought home a lot of stuff this week that she did over the year, and we had a very nice class potluck on Monday evening, where we all got to see each other one last time, do some celebrating, and look at stuff. The first graders had been doing autobiographies; I got to look at a couple of them, and they were great! Also, they handed out CD’s with a few hundred pictures (and some movies, I think) on them. So lots of stuff to remember people by; who knows, maybe I’ll even put some of the pictures on my home page, so people will be able to see pictures of Miranda without, say, a pacifier in her mouth…

As threatened earlier, I’ve started to work Dance Dance Revolution (the specific version I have is DDRMAX, just for the record) into my exercise routine. I do it on days when either the weather is such that I’d rather not jog, or when I’m recovering from a cold and don’t feel like jogging but don’t mind exercising without leaving the house.

Interesting results. I sweat at least as much while playing DDR as I do when jogging. I almost never breathe as heavily, though. It does seem to get the heart rate up pretty well. My legs don’t feel as tired as they do when I’m jogging. All in all, I’m pretty sure that jogging does me more good than DDR does (especially since I suspect that I need aerobic exercise more than other forms of exercise), but DDR is probably better than nothing, and it’s possible that they’re helpful in complementary ways.

Certainly playing DDR is a lot more fun than jogging, even with iPod. The music is great, and there are enough songs there that it will take a while for me to get bored from the repetition. DDR and Katamari Damacy are convincing me that Namco has the best music of any video game company. (Though Space Channel 5 was pretty awesome, too…) Pleasantly challenging, with a nice learning curve.

The room layout isn’t that great: the couch is kind of close to the TV, which is fine for watching TV and playing video games normally, but not so great if you’re standing in front of the couch. For whatever reason, the pad shifts a little bit while I’m playing; that’s not too surprising, but what is interesting (to me, at least) is that it rotates clockwise. What asymmetry in my play style causes that? (It could be an asymmetry in the pad itself, but I can’t think of one.) I haven’t counted, but I think I use both feet about the same amount. (A little strange, actually: I would have expected I’d favor my right foot.) It may be the case that I hit the front arrow more with my right foot and the back arrow more with my left foot, but why would that cause rotation? Maybe I move more emphatically when going from front/back to side than in the other direction? Hard to say.

It was pretty weird to read in the paper that the Supreme Count had a 6-3 opinion where the three were Rehnquist, Thomas, and O’Connor (with Scalia in the majority). And even weirder that I agreed with Rehnquist and Thomas. Such are the bedfellows that medicinal pot makes; I guess it’s not all that surprising that it’s the sort of issue that could bring together a strange coalition.

I’m honestly not sure what I think about the whole interstate commerce thing, and skimming the opinion hasn’t helped much. In general, I think the left is a bit confused on this issue: we end up supporting decisions that rest on the interstate commerce clause not because we agree with the logic but because we have more faith in the federal government than in state governments, at least in issues where the clause could be applicable. Which is problematic for two reasons:

• The constitution is important, so we should try to support Supreme Court decisions with reasoning based on the constitution itself.
• I’m not at all convinced that, in general, pragmatic reasons should cause us to support the federal government over state governments.

I tend to agree with some people on the right that the interstate commerce clause is way over-applied. And certainly the pot laws are screwed up: it shouldn’t be illegal in the first place, never mind medicinal pot, and my understanding is that medicinal pot has the support of a significant majority of americans. So I would like to put those two together and say that the court made the wrong decision, but the truth is that I don’t really know where to draw the constitutional dividing line, and I will admit that the federal government should be allowed to pass misguided but constitutional laws.

Chalk up another one for the prison/military/industrial complex.

As I lamented about a month ago, the A’s offense has been subpar this year. What I didn’t expect was that it was actually going to get worse after that post: I had largely chalked it down to small sample size, and how long can that continue? But from May 1 to May 29, they won 5 games and lost 20. It’s not easy to have two 8-game losing streaks in a single month, but they managed it.

Fortunately, this week has been a complete change of pace: a four-game winning streak, followed by a loss, followed by two more wins. With quite nice hitting, both volume-wise and clitch-wise. Yesterday, after they gave up two runs in the first two innings, I was nervous, but they stopped the bleeding there, and in the sixth inning Eric Byrnes made a great defensive play and then hit a two-run homer in the bottom of the inning, and the A’s tacked on a few more later to win. Yay. Hopefully this is a little closer to their true offensive performance, and once Rich Harden gets back, maybe they’ll go on a bit of a tear.

Mind you, I’m still not optimistic about their making the playoffs this year. But a rebuilding year wouldn’t be the end of the world.

Nice to see that the O’s are still playing reasonably well, if not quite as well as they were in April.

The upcoming game that I’m most excited about is Spore. It’s by Will Wright, the guy who did Sim City and The Sims, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Or rather, I’ve seen tons of things like parts of it, but nothing that puts its all together the way that this game is trying to do.

He apparently got his inspiration from the old Powers of Ten movie, that starts at a microscopic scale, and pulls the camera back ten fold over and over again until it gets to a human scale, a planetary scale, a galactic scale. Spore is trying to use the same idea in its gameplay: you start off by playing a microscopic organism, that goes around eating stuff and laying eggs. Each time it lays an egg, it changes a bit, gradually evolving into a larger organism. Eventually it gets to the level of a fish swimming around in the ocean, or an animal walking on land, trying to eat, survive, kill other animals and reproduce.

Once your creature gets a big enough brain, it becomes sentient, so the gameplay switches into a of tribal level, where you’re discovering tools and beginning to accrue elemnts of civilization. Then, when your tribe gets big enough, it turns into a Sim City-style game, with Civilization-style conflicts with other cities on the planet. Once you develop further, you begin to terraform and colonize other worlds in your solar system; then you become able to interact with other nearby civilizations, and eventually expand out further through the galaxy.

Which is pretty amazing: lots of my favorite games, all tied together in a wonderful-sounding way.

Wright gave a presentation on it at the 2005 Game Developer’s conference; I recently learned (from Sun’s president’s blog, amusingly enough) that there’s a video of his presentation. (It’s free, but you have to register; I hope I don’t get too much e-mail from them, but it’s worth it, and lots of the other presentations look interesting, too.) It shows lots of gameplay snippets, and also provides some interesting game design insights.

One of the big issues in game design these days is that, as computers get more powerful and storage media gets bigger, games get bigger in scope, requiring huge amount of resources to flesh out. This is a problem: games are now, for example, trying to simulate entire cities fairly seriously, and it takes a huge number of person-hours to, for example, design all those buildings. So content creation eats up huge chunks of games’ budgets.

One thing that Wright noticed about The Sims was that people often really enjoy doing content creation themselves: it’s a lot of fun, it’s a way for people to put their own personal stamp on the game. Apparently people can create stuff in The Sims and upload it to a web site where other people have access to it, and there’s a vast amount of content available this way, of increasingly high quality.

Spore is taking this lesson to heart. In the first place, the evolution of your creatures isn’t random: you control it, with different (but related) editors for the different stages of the game. So the creatures that you end up taking over the galaxy with are unmistakably yours: you decided on every aspect of their development, and another player would have come up with a completely different design.

That’s great, as far as it goes: the game’s creators don’t have to worry about designing the perfect protagonist for the game, they leave that up to you. But what about the creatures you’re going to interact with? How are they going to be designed?

One conventional answer these days would be to simply make the game networked, so the other creatures were played by different people. And I can imagine that an online version of this could be a lot of fun; I wouldn’t be the one having the fun, however, because I don’t have time to regularly devote to online game playing.

But that’s not necessary to solve the problem at hand. Making this an online game would mean that other people both design and control the other creatures; what if we divorce these aspects? Controlling other creatures is tricky, but it’s a problem that we’re getting better at solving without require massive amounts of human resources. Doing large-scale interesting designs, however, is labor-intensive.

So the solution is that, whenever you design something (a creature, a building, whatever), it can get downloaded to the game’s servers. Then, whenever the game needs to populate the surrounding area, or give you choices for buildings to build, or whatever, it downloads new content from those servers. This is done asynchronously behind your back: you don’t have to worry about being logged on at specific times, you don’t play directly against other people, you just all work together to get a big content library.

And it tries to do this in a clever way. It choses creatures to fill up an ecosystem sensible; it makes building designs available that are somewhat similar to the buildings you’ve already got. It notices which designs are more popular and less popular, and adjusts their availability accordingly.

The game is still a work in progress: its current planned release date is the end of 2006, and release dates slip a lot more often than they get pushed up. If they can pull it off, though, it will be amazing.

A little while back, I read Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel trilogy. A trilogy of thick fantasy novels, the sort of thing that I normally avoid, but I’d been getting the feeling over the last few years that I’d been avoiding fantasy novels more than I should. So when I ran into an interesting review of the trilogy in The New York Review of Science Fiction, I thought I’d give it a try. Plus, the protagonist’s name ends in Delaunay, which is kind of like Delany, which probably isn’t an accident.

I’m glad I read them. I’m not sure fantasy is quite the right genre characterization: maybe it’s more alternate history. (A genre that I read almost never.) Hard to say; not a lot of magic, and such magic as there is is more the effects of gods than people casting spells, but on the other hand the history becomes alternate two millenia ago, and the trilogy takes place seven centuries (if I recall correctly) after the point of divergence. So it doesn’t fit too neatly into either genre’s mainstream, for what that’s worth. (Not much, I know.)

The divergence comes (if I’m remembering correctly – I checked the first two books out of the library, so I don’t have them at hand) in the form of somebody who was created from Christ’s blood during the crucifiction, and an angel who follows that person all over Europe, having sex with strangers whenever necessary to ease their passage. Eventually, they settle in what is now France, and a nation arises that follows their teachings.

And this divergence is handled in interesting ways; I like the way the book questions Christianity, and gives glimpses of what could have been. For one thing, some people will claim that Christianity is all about love, and certainly those aspects of Christianity are what I find most attractive about it. But there seem to be a whole lot of Christians in the world for whom love is the farthest thing from their mind, and Christianity in general seems quite sex-negative. So it’s nice to see a take-off from Christianity that starts by focusing on love, but starting from the more physical side of things. And other aspects of love are never absent from the book, and come to the fore more and more as the trilogy progresses, in ways that I found quite powerful.

Also, it’s nice to see a world where monotheism never took over; caught as we are now in a war between monotheists, I am, quite frankly, sick of the whole idea.

I’m not in the mood for plot summarization, but I will say that each book in the trilogy kept me reading much later than was wise as I was finishing it.

So: score one for following random fantasy recommendations. I wonder what I should read next in that genre?

(Unrelated note: a Penguin Classics complete collection is about to be released. Pretty cool; I spent a lot of time reading Penguin Classics when I was younger…)