Archive for category The Afterlife
The First Attack
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on July 16, 2014
In one of the workshops I went to before the official start of the 13th International Conference on the Short Story in English, we were given four pages of text from various sources (see if you can recognise them!) and instructed to cut each page into four pieces, mix them up, lay them out on a table and note down any interesting phrases we found by aligning lines from different pieces of paper. We were free to slightly alter the sentences so they’d make sense. What I ended up with rather amused me, so I’ll post it here, as a sort of found poetry:
The first attack, where ignorant armies clash
Where the sea meets the shadow of the moon of death
The thing they would not stand was back, and back, and fling
Stand together to win the war against steel, but they cannot dent the steel.
A great people has been moved to naked shingles of the world
The President agreed, in the white immunity, “I fear no evil, for I implemented our government’s. Tonight, I ask for your prayers for all the three-shilling tea, and the best worlds have been shattered.”
I was particularly amused by the two chance juxtapositions that led to ‘in the white immunity’ and ‘I fear no evil, for I implemented our government’s’. So far at the conference I’ve met all sorts of interesting people and learnt many things (it is strange to see a partially-academic conference that has nothing whatsoever to do with particle physics) and heard many stories. I can’t say much about them now, though, as I’d like to get a half-decent amount of sleep before I read a story and introduce a few others at the conference tomorrow. I’m too tired to even read the entry on aleatory poetics in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.
Recipe: Mozartpuffreisschnitten
Posted by Angela Brett in Recipes, The Afterlife on June 1, 2014
In 2009 in Geneva, I made a pavlova for my birthday. In 2012 in Sweden, some friends made me a pancake cake. This year, in Vienna, I went to two concerts between the time my birthday started in New Zealand and the time it ended in Austria. When Sara Chicazul goes to a concert on her birthday, she makes cake, Nanaimo bars, cupcakes, or Nanaimo bar cupcakes, for the entire audience, so I decided I’d have to do the same. While I did help Sara with Nanaimo bar cupcakes before JoCo Cruise Crazy 4, I was a minion rather than an evil genius, so I don’t really have the expertise to make a lot of cupcakes myself. What’s more, I had a French exam the day of the first concert, so I didn’t have a lot of time. Instead, I made about the third simplest food that can be made with puffed rice (a.k.a. Rice Krispies, Rice Bubbles, Ricies.) I made Rice Krispies Treats (a.k.a. Rice Bubbles Squares, or some other combination of a word for puffed rice and either ‘treats’ or ‘squares’) with Austria’s famous (i.e. I’d never heard of them until a tour guide told us about them the first time I visited Austria) Mozartkugeln (a.k.a. Mozart balls, followed by sniggering) mixed in.
So here is the recipe for what I’m going to call Mozartpuffreisschnitten. Serves two concert audiences including performers (bigger than Viertel, smaller than the first JoCo Cruise Crazy, which the Nanaimo bars were made for) with enough left over for a peckish post-birthday girl.
- One 300g bag of marshmallows — I used a bag of white ones, but the ones pictured here are multicoloured because I took the picture of my spare pack after making them.
- One 170g bag of Mozartkugeln Minis.
- About six cups of puffed rice cereal. It turns out, going by my quick look in a few shops and the word of a few locals, that there is no such cereal available in Austria. Luckily, I had enough that I’d brought with me from Switzerland, but I had hoped to get some more to be sure, and was quite surprised by this lack. Probably any light cereal that isn’t too sweet would work. I saw several cereals that seemed like good candidates, but they were 30% honey, which seems like overkill when you’re adding 470g of candy. But hey, it’s your birthday, you’re allowed twice as much redundantly superfluous overkill as you want.
- A little bit of some kind of oil (probably optional.) I found a recipe online that said to use butter, but I didn’t have any, so I used sunflower oil. I don’t think the oil is really necessary anyway.
- Some non-stick baking paper.
- Cornflakes to garnish (optional.) I’d bought them as an emergency filler in case of insufficient puffed rice, and decided to stick them on for decoration and to reduce stickiness.
Pour the oil, marshmallows and Mozartkugeln into a pan, and put it on a medium heat.
The chocolate will melt first. It turns out there’s no solid, unmeltable centre in Mozart balls.
Soon the marshmallows will start to get gooey. Have fun mixing them with the melted chocolate.
Soon enough the marshmallows will be fairly smooth, and you can make streaky patterns in them with the chocolate. Take a note of how you feel at this moment: this is what it was like to create Jupiter.
But eventually you’ll have to say goodbye to Jupiter and say hello to smooth, uniform, light brown goo. Don’t worry, Zeno, you don’t have to say hello and goodbye every time the streakiness changes.
Turn off the heat and pour in the puffed rice, stopping to mix it in a couple of times. Add more if there still seems to be enough goo to hold it. You’d be surprised at how much can still be mixed in when it already looks fairly dry. Pour it all onto the baking paper such that it’s a few centimetres high. Or make it into a giant Mozart ball; I don’t care. Add cornflakes or whatever garnish you like that will stick on.
Once it’s cooled, cut it into squares, or rectangles, or smaller balls, so it’s easier for people to eat. Don’t worry about it too much; it’s easy to tear into smaller chunks with your hands, so if your concertgoers want smaller pieces they can have them.
Everybody who tried the ones I made said they liked them. Some had tried Rice Krispie treats in the USA and missed them. In my opinion, the finished product didn’t taste too much like Mozartkugeln, so if I did this again I’d use more of them. The only other time I’ve made Rice Krispie Treats, I added Sprüngli chocolat chaud grand cru and it made it really chocolatey. The classic recipe is just puffed rice and marshmallows, so of course it’s good with any amount of Mozartkugeln, including zero.
I almost forgot: the other thing that happened on my birthday was the song I wrote to sing with Worm Quartet went live on The FuMP sideshow.
The One-Eyed Princess
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on March 20, 2014
Once upon a time there was a princess with only one eye. Now, we need two eyes to see depth, so the one-eyed princess could only see people as they looked on the surface, and not how they were in their hearts. Such a handicap would make life difficult for a commoner, but a princess’s only job is to find a handsome prince to marry, and her one eye made her exceptionally good at determining handsomeness, so nobody worried.
The princess was kind-hearted, and she grew to be very kind and pleasant to anyone she thought good-looking enough to be a good person. She was less kind to the plainer-looking people who she assumed were not as good. Being a princess, she didn’t often have to be around people who looked bad. The ugliest people she saw were servants, whom she was allowed to treat poorly.
And so the time came when the princess was expected to marry. Princes voyaged from far and wide to meet the princess at a grand ball. The King and Queen were careful to only give invitations to the very handsomest of princes, lest the princess displease handsome princes by showing how badly she treated the less handsome ones.
The princess’s handmaidens worked tirelessly to prepare the princess to meet her suitors, and were only called names in return. One of them was losing her hair from worry, and the princess treated her all the worse for it. On the eve of the ball, the handmaiden could not bear to continue, and gave the princess a mirror, so that she may groom herself.
For the first time, the princess saw her reflection. She saw the smooth skin where her left eye should be, and how ugly that made her. She saw that she was even more worthless than the ugliest of her servants. She ran out into the rainforest by the castle, crying as much as her single eye could. She threw herself down by a pond, and saw her reflection in it, the smooth skin reddened and swollen with trapped tears. “No handsome prince will ever love someone as ugly as me!” she wailed.
Now, a chameleon walking nearby heard this, and being a smart chameleon, he knew that there were benefits to marrying even an ugly princess. So he changed himself to look like one of the handsome princes he had seen entering the castle.
“Oh!” said the princess as the prince appeared beside her. “You look like a mean old tax collector. Kindly give me my taxes or go away.” So the chameleon went away. The princess looked at her reflection again, and saw that she did not deserve the taxes.
The chameleon waited for a more handsome prince to arrive at the castle, and changed himself to look like him. When he approached the princess, she said, “Hello, there, Sir! You are surely a knight. Do you need a stable girl? For I am clearly not fit to be a princess.”
The chameleon said, “Sorry, Miss. I thought you were my horse,” and went away. The princess cried so much into the pond that the water, and her reflection, became clearer, and the ugly red bulge where her left eye ought to have been grew to the size of a plum. She saw it and knew that she did not deserve to live.
Just as the princess was about to throw herself into the water and drown, the chameleon came back, disguised as the handsomest prince he could find. He held the princess by the waist to keep her from falling in. “Oh, thank you, your Highness! You have saved me!” she said. “But I am not deserving of your kindness.”
“It was simply the right thing to do, ma’am; the pond does not deserve to be so sullied,” replied the chameleon.
The princess agreed. “You are right, of course, your Highness. But is there anything I can do to repay your good deed? Through some accident of birth, I am a princess, so I can give you anything you want.”
The chameleon replied, “As a handsome prince, I already have almost everything I could wish for. But I am a friend of the forest creatures, and my own kingdom does not have such vast rainforests as yours. So I ask that you marry me, and when the time comes for you to take the throne, let me rule as King in your stead.” And that’s exactly what she did. When the chameleon became King, he ordered the people to move to the outskirts of the kingdom, so that the rainforest could grow and give more room for his chameleon family.
The chameleon did not always treat the princess well, but as he was so handsome, she could tell he was a good person who was kinder to her than she deserved. As he had two eyes, the chameleon could tell that the princess was a good person who was kinder to him than he deserved, but he did not always treat her well. And so, they lived happily ever after.
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Why Not All of Randall Munroe’s Suggestions Should be Implemented on JoCo Cruise Crazy 4
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on January 11, 2014
On JoCo Cruise Crazy 3, xkcd’s Randall Munroe told us all about the ball pit in his apartment, and finished by telling us how much it would cost to fill the entire ship with playpen balls. Somebody in the audience asked if we could have a ball pit in the game room next year. Some time ago, the powers that be announced that there will indeed be a ball pit in an inner cabin on JoCo Cruise Crazy 4. Later it became clear that this was all just a ploy to help Paul and Storm fulfill Kickstarter rewards for their next album, Ball Pit, but I’m not complaining.
Randall Munroe also told us how long we could survive if JoCo Cruise Crazy 4 were filled to the top with meat, and then how long we’d survive if we only had the other cruise passengers (which are conveniently made of meat) to feast on:
I’ve come to realise that this would not be a good idea to implement on JoCo Cruise Crazy 4. That is to say, it has the potential to be more awesome than we realised at the time, but it would considerably disrupt the programmed entertainment.
A few days ago, Randall made some calculations about the number of humans required to sustain a Tyrannosaurus rex. Apparently only half an adult a day. If there were a single T-rex on the cruise, then given the ratio of Sea Monkeys (JoCo Cruise Crazy attendees) to other passengers and crew, a Sea Monkey would have less chance of getting eaten by the King of the Tyrant Lizards than being chosen Monarch of the Seas.
However, assuming Randall was using short scales when he said ‘six hundred billion calories’, if the entire ship were filled to the top with meat, that would be enough to sustain a population of 2.5 million (2 500 000) T-Rexes for the duration of the cruise. And one of them would sleep in the meatball pit.
Drabble: I sure appreciate the way you’re working with me.
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on October 21, 2013
“I… I th… thought you’d left,” I stammered.
“I came back,” he replied nonchalantly. “It’s not as if I died.” He looked at me accusingly.
“Well, I…”
Such lively eyes staring at me from a deathly face were unnerving. I gave in, and went to get some textbooks.
“Let’s work on something together,” he suggested. “My brain is open.” Indeed it was, but I tried not to look.
Uncertain though I was about the feasibility of living and undead working together, I could not refuse his offer of collaboration. And that’s how I got a late Erdős number of one.
∎
If I Made Adverts for Hair Gel, Part Two
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on December 24, 2011
This is a mash-up of my first ad for hair gel and the picture Len drew for my video about Jonathan Coulton’s Thing a Week project. I imagine that the two parts would be on sequential odd-numbered pages.
Video: Anniversary Cards Redux
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on December 3, 2011
Do you remember Anniversary Cards, in which I wrote a ‘Roses are Red’-style poem for each of the songs Jonathan Coulton wrote for his Thing a Week project? Well, recently Jonathan ran a Thing a Week Redux in which he reposted each of the Thing a Week blog entries five years after the original, with some new commentary. Just like during the original Thing a Week, I didn’t get around to reading it very often. However, as I was catching up with it around five weeks from the end, I got the idea of revisiting those Roses are Red rhymes and turning them into a video to celebrate the end of Thing a Week Redux. I didn’t get it done in time, so I saved it for Jonathan’s birthday (December 1) instead. Here’s the video:
That was not specifically made for his birthday, but this other video I was involved with (mostly on ridiculous percussion that didn’t make the cut, and robot choir in the final few verses) was:
It’s based on A Talk With George, which Jonathan has said was his favourite Thing a Week, and rewritten, sung, strummed, mixed, filmed and cut by the great people on Jonathan Coulton’s forums, most of which I have met or will meet in real life at concerts in the UK or on JoCo Cruise Crazy.
And now back to overexplaining the first video.
How to gain super powers by sneaking into a particle physics lab
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife, video on October 24, 2011
In the film Spider-Man 3, escaped convict Flint Marko jumps over a fence marked:
Danger
Particle Physics Test Facility
Keep Out
And ends up getting caught in a some kind of beam and becoming the Sandman, a being made out of sand who can change his shape at will. I watched it in the theatre with about a dozen people from CERN (all of them named Maikel), and one of them exclaimed, ‘Run to building 40, get a coffee!’
Unfortunately, you won’t turn into the Sandman by sneaking into CERN. But you might just turn into something like the Silver Surfer. Well, okay, maybe you wouldn’t travel faster than light, but you could levitate. I finally got to do so on their superconducting scooter at the Supra Show to celebrate 100 years of superconductivity a couple of weeks ago:
And you don’t even need to jump a fence! Just keep an eye on CERN’s homepage and MaNEP’s homepage, and sign up to the Globe’s mailing list to find out when there will be interesting talks and demonstrations for the general public. There are also a few other events coming up where it might make an appearance. I’ve seen the scooter at a couple of different events, and I don’t know how often they bring it out, but there are many other interesting talks and demonstrations.
There’s more information on how the superconducting scooter works in the video description. It’s essentially superdiamagnetism, as far as I know. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as Superman, but hey, it’s real! Welcome to the future. Here’s a nice explanation which begins with a Superman reference. Incidentally, you don’t have to be a superconductor to levitate due to diamagnetism. Even frogs can levitate, but it’s not easy.
Of course, the other way you could become a superhero is by using Generic™ brand hair gel.
By the way, the song in that video is Liquid Nitrogen, by CERN’s other LHC, Les Horribles Cernettes. My other superpower is knowing a song about almost every topic. Today, somebody brought up Malcolm Gladwell’s idea that becoming an expert at something takes 10 000 hours of practice, so I decided to find out how much time I’ve spent listening to funny music. I wrote an AppleScript to sum up the time spent listening to the selected songs in iTunes, and selected all the songs in my Silly Songs playlist. Alas, I have only listened to it for 3026 hours, at least since April 2005 when I dropped my iPod and lost all that information. So if it turns out there’s something I don’t have a song about, it’s because I’m not an expert. I am an expert on all of my music, including the ‘normal’ stuff, though, with 11 242 hours.
Back to superheroes: Could somebody who understands more about the relationship of electric power to superconductivity please make a joke involving Spider-Man’s ‘with great power comes great responsibility’? As far as I can tell, with great power comes the same great power, circulating forever, but that’s not very funny. Just like immortality without immunity to pain isn’t very funny after the Sun burns out, when you’re just floating through space for eons on end, occasionally getting stuck inside a star or black hole until it goes supernova or evaporates.
Addendum: I finally wrote a short story about that last sentence.
Addendum 2: Someone I know only as arthurd006_5 suggests ‘with great power comes great coercivity‘ but isn’t sure whether that works electromagnetically. It does sound nice though, and outside of electromagnetism, great coercion seems to come with great power.
AppleScript: Fixing tags of free music podcasts in iTunes
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on October 23, 2011
I’m a bit of a free music junkie. Free as in beer (or doughnuts, since I don’t like beer) is good, free as in speech is better, but this post is about the free as in doughnuts kind, which costs nothing until you get a taste for doughnuts and then end up buying out the whole Krispy Kreme, travelling around the world to have different doughnuts with different people, and getting too fat for your iPod. Download free music responsibly, kids (okay, I guess the beer metaphor would have made more sense.) Anyway, back to free music. One way I discover a lot of music is through podcasts which regularly publish individual songs. However, I use iTunes, and iTunes gives podcast tracks the name and artist given in the podcast feed (often taken from the title of a blog post) over whatever was set in the ID3 tags of the mp3 file itself. This might be a good idea for non-music podcasts, and maybe some music podcasts, where the details aren’t necessarily filled out, but for some of the music podcasts I subscribe to it doesn’t really work out. Particularly if there’s a blog post associated with each podcast episode, the title tends to include the artist name and sometimes some other information.
I can’t be bothered fixing all of the tracks manually, so a few years ago I wrote a few AppleScripts to fix up the metadata of the music podcasts I was subscribed to, and also add the tracks to my Songs playlist (which I use as the basis of most of my smart playlists) and turn off the ‘Remember position’ and ‘Skip while shuffling’ options that are turned on by default for podcast tracks. I’ve since subscribed to and made scripts to fix a few more music podcasts, and it occurred to me that other people might find the scripts useful, so I’ve just tidied up the code and added a way to choose which playlist to add the tracks to. There are links to the scripts and related podcasts below.
Comic: Control Systems Explained
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on September 25, 2011
I’ve been involved in control systems for various amazing things for the last six and a half years, and the other day I finally hit upon a way to explain what that is.
In reality, I spend most of my time writing code to do things to databases or writing generic add-ons for the software used for the control systems, but this sounds much cooler.
Continuing with that idea, here is a very rough (both in artwork and factual accuracy) illustration of how control systems interact with a few other things:
In reality, of course, it’s a little more complicated, the safety systems work, and I haven’t seen graph paper for far too long. This was just for fun. The big red button picture is a public domain image from wikipedia and the graph paper was from SciRep. All other art is by me, which is why it’s so terrible.
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