Musings of the Hearth

Celtics - Cavs Game 1

Wow, strange game last night. Clevelands shoots just over 30% and almost wins!!! Ray Allen scores ZERO and Pierce is 2 for 14 but made up for by James not being able to hit anything either. Great game for Garnett, Rondo, Cassell and a couple big 3s from Posey but except for a couple shots from Perkins, the rest of the team was almost useless - team actually would have been better off if Ray Allen hadn't shown up at all which is pretty amazing. And 23 turnovers! That is crazily bad. Hopefully people get on track for the rest of the series.

In the end, I'm just glad they won. I think a loss in a game like that at home might have been devastating.

Sweet story

Super-sweet story about an incident at a Division II college women's softball game.

Link via Eric Berlin and Kottke.

The idiotic Gas tax vacation idea.

Excellent post on the Clinton/McCain idiotic gasoline tax vacation idea. In particular

We have no energy policy, and none on the horizon. Candidates serious about the issue of high energy prices should be discussing increased CAFE standards, capital gains tax waivers for alternative energy investments, greater offshore drilling, Pigou taxes, rapid nuclear plant approvals, a huge increase in the basic R&D the government does on energy -- a Manhattan project for energy and transportation science.

This all seems so damn obvious and yet none of it gets done. So frustrating.

Movies: Into the Wild

I was really impressed with this film, in a lot of different respects. The acting and cinematography are all great but I was also very impressed with some other small aspects, like surprised at how well the text across the screen letters worked. I for some reason had thought I had read the book but, after seeing the movie, I obviously hadn't. If the movie is an accurate representation of his time, it is an incredibly impressive set of adventures and relationships to build over two years, all while sticking to his decision to not communicate at all with his family - a pretty incredible story. ****1/2

Biofuels Unintended Consequences Article

Worth reading this article in Time magazine on the broader impact of using farmland for biofuels. Not that this really surprises me - everything serious I have heard, not that I really know that much about the issue, says that Ethanol (at least corn-based) is a basically bad idea.

Y: The Last Man

I am probably way behind on this but if you haven't read it and like comic books at all, I hugely recommend it. I picked up the first volume (issues 1-5 or so) of this comic book the other day from the library after coming across several mentions of it and it really is just great. Have now read the first three volumes and have the rest on request. Engrossing, fun, and great concept with some very cool ideas of what would happen to the world if all the males were to suddenly die.

Project Euler update

Made it into the Top 1000 after yesterday and problems remain interesting.

Couple of ones lately I found interesting were #79 with just how easy it was - did in less than 5 minutes by hand and #58. On this one, it first took me a while to realize the magnitude of the numbers one is dealing with before one gets to the result. Realizing this, I had to shift my approach but I didn't want to individually test for primality an insane number of numbers (mostly for primes I have just been reading in a list of them from a file but it only goes up to like 20 million and here one needs to go way beyond that). I first tried to do a Sieve of Eratosthenes but my computer couldn't handle the memory requirements of a 300+ million element array in Perl. Doing this in C++ with Booleans probably would have solved this but decided not to go that route. I finally ended up using a hybrid approach that was acceptably fast. Read in my primes list file and for numbers under 2 million check against it and then for bigger numbers (by which point one is only needing to test 1 in 1000+ numbers) individually check them.

Movies: Enchanted

Although I had heard only good reviews of this, it was still better than I expected - just adorable and enchanting. The filmmakers and actors (particularly Amy Adams) take a hokey idea and implement it so beautifully that it almost completely works (the only thing that really doesn't is why doesn't Robert realize that she is something miraculous when he sees her abilities with animals). The first half of the movie in particular is just absolutely great. Incredibly light and super-sweet and highly recommended. ****1/2

Project Euler

Has anyone done Project Euler? It is a quite interesting set of math/programming problems. Really think would be a great way to learn a new programming language but I am just doing them in my primary language, Perl, at the moment. I have done 51 problems so far including all of the first 50 except for #46 which I am kind of stuck on. If by any chance you have done #46 (or go ahead and do it after reading this), can you drop me a note? I'd really like to know the magnitude of the answer.

I've been really enjoying solving these. Haven't worried about speed or elegance and just hacking code to get an answer although in a few cases I had to completely rethink/optimize my approach for one reason or another (#11 and #26 in particular). Think some of this will get into math that is somewhat over my head so not sure whether I will keep trying to solve them all and how far into it I will go. Need another 15 or so to make the top 1000.

By the way, I mentioned this to a friend as a good way to learn a new language and we both agreed but of course these are all mathematical in nature and there is a lot of ground they wouldn't cover. Does anyone know of a site with like N (being 10 or 20 or something I expect) problems to do (probably starting with "Hello World" and then getting much more involved fast) after which one should have a basic understanding of the main elements of a language?

Movies: No Country for Old Men

Not at all surprisingly, I thought this was absolutely excellent. Wonderful writing, acting, cinematography and story and an unbelievably memorable character in Anton Chigurh. I was particularly impressed by how smart all the significant characters are. Everything they do is sensible and thought out, even if doesn't work out so well in many cases. Was totally confused by the ending but that was pretty obviously intentional and didn't detract from the movie. ****1/2

Oscars

Enjoyed the Oscars last night, although I sped through them a fair bit. Was happy with pretty much all the winners, especially "Once" for Best Song (although disgusted with them for not letting Markéta Irglová speak at all - at least they brought her back out and it turned out to be about the best acceptance speech of the night). Even though I haven't yet seen it, I was greatly rooting for "No Country for Old Men"/the Coen brothers and very glad it won the major prizes - I'll see it as soon as comes out on DVD. The only winner I kind of disagreed with was Tilda Swinton in "Michael Clayton", who I think is an excellent actress but didn't think her role here that interesting. Wilkinson in the same film was far more impressive. However, I guess the competition (many of which I haven't seen) was far greater in the male Supporting Actor category than the female one, which is very sad but often the case. I also noticed in watching the Best Picture montage that I have seen every winner (again, briefly excepting this year) going back to 1972 (although some ages ago and don't remember at all really). Given that, I just added "The French Connection" and "Oliver!" to my Netflix queue which would push it back to 1966. Also, I hadn't so much directly noticed it but really was a great year for Europeans, taking all of the acting prizes and Best Song and probably some others....

Movie: Diggers

This is a small but excellent movie about Long Island clam diggers, set in 1976. It is filled with atmosphere, of both the time and place, and the acting is all excellent. There is nothing amazing or that unusual about it but very well crafted. ****

TV: Sarrah Connor Chronicles

Today isn't the best day to be recommending this, given a couple of minor things in last night's episode, but Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles I think is absolutely excellent, MUCH better than I expected, and I highly recommend it. I like it much better than BSG and think it is probably the best SF show in years. Summer Glau in particular is incredibly good (like her more here than in Firefly where she oddly played a similar character).

The problems in last night's episode were basically the standard problems when media uses chess for anything. The ridiculous, but movie cliche, 'surprise mate' in a game supposedly at Grandmaster+ level and the completely wrong use of the term 'zugzwang' were boneheaded errors but a minor thing overall.

Superdelegates

Although I knew about the concept before, Superdelegates (much more used in the Democratic party primary system than the Republican) seem a pretty awful thing. These are 'party leader' delegates like Bill Clinton who are not chosen by the people at all and there are a TON of them, like 25% as many as elected delegates. Currently, depending on which CNN page you go by, Hillary, if you ignored the superdelegates either has a TINY lead (like 7 delegates) or is behind by a similar amount, either one given that Edwards has 26 delegates, would lead to a brokered convention. However, Hillary has a like 200-100 lead in superdelegates so is ahead by around 90 overall. Showing Hillary with a 90 delegate lead is really misleading, as it turns out the voting by the people is as close to 50-50 as it could possibly be but most people won't realize that and will think she has a small but not insignificant lead.

I strongly prefer Obama to Hillary but, even if I didn't, this system seems really bad. A person could win more than 60% of the elected delegates and still lose the primary if all the superdelegates were against him. The "Democratic" party should be ashamed of this system imho.

SuperBowl - Great Game!

Wow, great game. Every single score caused a lead change. Came down to the very last minute. Neither offense played great but the game overall was amazingly good. The only thing I thought was crazy was Eli Manning getting the MVP. There is no way, imho, he deserved it. I would without question have given it to the Giants defensive front line as a group who put pressure on Brady pretty much all game and thereby kept the Giants in it. Manning at the end seemed several times to just toss up balls and hope his guys got to them, with Tyree doing so in the most important and difficult catch of the game. Anyway, great game and thanks to C & C for their hospitality and all.

I personally didn't feel strongly about which team won and was mostly just happy to have a good game. Upon thinking about it after, I think my personal choice for things would have been if the Giants had won the final regular season game and the Patriots had won the Super Bowl but this result was fine too.

On the commercials side, my favorite by far was the Underdog/Stewie/Charlie Brown Coke commercial. I thought it sweet Charlie Brown won.