Handicapping the Great 20th Century Novels, part 2
A handy gizmo for Handicapping the Great 20th Century Novels.
I have made some major improvements to the interface, mostly dealing with adding and removing handicapping categories.
I have also been adding new books to the list, it now includes a full list of Pulitzer Prize winning novels, as well as Newbery Medal winners. There are 287 works in the data set.
exposition
I recently read the first two books in the Dune series, Dune (1965) and Dune Messiah (1969). An interesting feature of the Dune story is that the books only cover key events in the adventures of Paul Muad’dib — in the first book: Paul’s adolescent exposure to Dune, the attack by the Harkonnens, Paul’s transformation into the Kwisatz Haderach, the spectacular defeat of the Emperor. Then the story jumps forward twelve years, years which are presumably full of exciting action sequences that we never get to see, because they only serve as exposition to get to the next interesting part of the story.
There is also a rich backstory for the characters and the story universe. Through the story we get hints at how Paul was trained as a child, of the actions of the Bene Gesserits, of a long distant galactic colonization. This backstory is both detailed and vague, providing room for new elements to be pulled into the story as needed. For example, the Bene Tleilax (or Tleilaxu) have little importance in the first novel (which was originally a serial), but become central to the plot of the second novel (also originally a serial).
Quel idiot!
“In terms of the detainees, we’ve had thousands of people detained. We’ve investigated every single complaint against the detainees. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of — and the allegations — by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble — that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is. And, you know — yes, sir.” – George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States. (emphasis mine)
Reading for May, 2005
In the past month, I read:
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1995. I think Larry’s Party is an even better novel, which was the first book I read by Shields. She had a gift for cosmic comedy. In case you don’t know, she died of cancer in 2003 at the age of 68.
Thinks Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I picked this one off of the “popular library” shelf at the central library, the shelf where they have multiple copies of books which are commonly assigned to students. I see that there are some sequels.
The Old Wives Tale by Arnold Bennett, number 87 on the Modern Library list. The main characters, Constance and Sophia, are wholly dull. One thing I will say for Bennett: he doesn’t disappoint your expectations because he never raises your expectations. And with this novel, I am at the 50/100 mark on the Modern Library list.
Abandoned novels:
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize with her most recent novel. That book has a long hold queue at the library, so I picked this one up first. Full of sleepy prose, there is no real direction to the story, as far as I can tell after skimming through the second half. The story is set in a town on the edge of a glacial lake, and consequently fails to be relevant to the world of 1980, when it was written. Maybe, just maybe, there is a quirky arthouse screenplay in there, but who cares?
Vectorpark / levers
I came across the levers game at vectorpark this afternoon. There are no credits on the page, but the internet suggests that it was created by Patrick Smith, and it has been around since at least May of 2001.
Spoilers below, so go play with it for a bit before you continue reading.
Prison Tycoon a real game?
If you do a Google search for “Prison Tycoon”, this site comes up as the second link. The first link goes to a page at Amazon that suggests that Prison Tycoon is a soon-to-be-released title from ValuSoft. I don’t see any information about the forthcoming game at the ValuSoft site.
UPDATE: comments for this entry are closed. Please see Prison Tycoon sneak peak and More Prison Tycoon notes for more information about this game.
Reading for April, 2005
On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Number 55 on the Modern Library list.
Golden Fool by Robin Hobb. The second book in the Tawny Man trilogy. I was glad to have this book with me at the MySQL conference.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.
Current reading: The Old Wives Tale by Arnold Bennett. Number 87 on the Modern Library list. Once I’ve finished this one I’ll be at the halfway mark. Then I think I’ll take a break from the Modern Library.
SELECT * FROM MySQL.Conference LIMIT 12,6
record 12
Wednesday afternoon and I’m taking the MySQL Core Certification exam. This exam is recommended for people who have one month of experience working with MySQL. There is also a “Professional” exam, for those with six months of experience. There is a bit of chatter that the Core exam is more difficult than the Professional (and being Core certified is a prerequisite for Professional).
I had to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement to take the exam. As part of the terms and conditions:
I will not copy, disclose, publish or transmit to any person or entity any details of any Certification Exam, or information pertaining to it, in any form or by any means.
Standard NDA stuff, and meaningless. I can’t disclose information pertaining to the exam in any form or by any means? So I shouldn’t reveal to anyone that I have ever taken the certification exam, or that I have even heard of it.
My exam number was MY001003B0073890.
dummy forms
Near the end of March, I disabled comments to the site (I renamed the script, thus breaking the link). I have been getting a new kind of comment spam that doesn’t get caught by MT Blacklist; those clever boys are randomly encoding the characters in their urls, so instead of “online-casinos” the url is “online-casinos”. The blacklist plugin doesn’t convert those entities back into characters, so they get past the filter.
This is, perhaps, fixed in the newer versions of MovableType, I don’t know, and I’m not upgrading just to find out. The spammers who use this method are a more sophisticated variety, they are using multiple IP numbers (either open proxies or zombied machines) so there’s no point in IP banning.
I’ve implemented dummy forms, as suggested by SimonG. These are duplicate comment entry forms that don’t display in the brower and that point to an incorrect comment URL. The idea is that automated scripts which look at the page source for the form tags will grab field names and urls from the dummy form, thus preventing the spam from getting posted.
I have also disabled new comments on older articles.
SELECT * FROM MySQL.Conference LIMIT 6,6
record 7
Scattered on the walls of the Santa Clara Westin Great America are a number of prints and paintings. Electronic signs indicate that these works are for sale. But for some reason the signature on the works is hidden by the frame. It is generic art. There are four very colorful monoprints in the hallway which goes between the convention area and the hotel proper. By one of the convention Ballrooms, there is what appears to be a large (perhaps 22″ x 30″) copper plate bearing the image of a flower. The image was flat bit, and the plate has been inked, and the plate mounted and framed. At least that is what it looks like to me.