Last year on JoCo Cruise, Aimee Mann sang a song called The Ballad of Captain Quark — the song title having been suggested by ChatGPT as a typical Jonathan Coulton song title:
This year, one of the theme days on the cruise was Captain Day, so obviously I had to dress as Captain Quark. I got a custom captain’s hat and some ‘Quark’s Bar‘ pyjama pants, and wore them with a ‘one quark, two quark, red quark, blue quark’ T-shirt I got in 2003 from online funny T-shirt pioneer Gary Freed, and a CMS hoodie I got from CERN last year.
Of course, this outfit on its own would make very little sense to most people, so I made some postcard-sized cards with the lyrics (as far as I can make them out) of the song on them. Here’s a pdf of that.
Of course, the song on its own would make very little sense to most people, so I wrote and illustrated an explanation of quarks, with particular reference to things mentioned in the song, for the other side of the cards. Here’s a pdf of that. This is my first real foray into science communication; how did I do?
I made it in OmniGraffle, because that seems to be my default these days. I didn’t have room to explain as much about colour confinement as I would have liked, and colour confinement is pretty neat (as is this animation of it.) Since Captain Day happened to be on the same day as the Open Mic, Joey Marianer sang part of The Ballad of Captain Quark, and then I followed up with what would be on the sequel postcard — my poem Juratron Park (which is available on my album!), and an explanation of that:
I recorded the rest of the open mic too… if you performed there, let me know if it’s okay to publish video of you, and what links or other information you want me to put in the video description.
On the subject of JoCo Cruise, the 2026 cruise is already sold out, with a long waitlist, but there is currently a possibility to add a second cruise the week immediately after that one, from March 28 to April 4 2026, leaving from San Diego. If you would like to be on that, and you haven’t already booked for the existing JoCo Cruise 2026, you can make a fully-refundable deposit. Deposits may be placed until Monday, April 7th at 8 pm EDT, and my understanding is the number of deposits they get by then will determine whether this second cruise becomes a reality. If it does, people already booked on the original cruise will have the opportunity to switch to the second one or book both.
On the 2024 cruise, Joey and I met someone wearing an ‘🌈I’ve got anxiety✨’ T-shirt, and Joey pretty much immediately wrote a barbershop tag about it (which we then sang two parts of to the shirt-wearer.) Joey has since found a workable way to record all the parts and put them together, so here it is, along with the shirt design:
Please feel free to replace the anxious voices in your head with this. Just sing at them when they try to tell you bad things. Earworms vs. Brainweasels: Fight!
Now for some updates on things mentioned in my last post. Joey and I have now finished watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, watched this chat between Wil Wheaton and Cirroc Lofton, and started watching Star Trek: Voyager, interspersed with episode recaps from The Delta Flyers podcast.
I’m still looking for a job, and working on the app I mentioned in my last post. Currently I’m learning about CloudKit, concurrency in SwiftData, and strict concurrency checking in Swift 6. I’ll be attending Deep Dish Swift in less than a month to learn about all sorts of other things.
Back in 2014 I recorded Hank Green talking about ‘picking the right addiction’ after a performance of his song ‘The Man Who Throws The Tetris Piece’. He said (with a few bits edited out so it makes more sense in text):
I’ve spent a fair amount of time addicted to Tetris, growing up. And now I spend about the same amount of time addicted to Flappy Bird — I’m not saying I’ve grown up at all. I think that there’s no way to escape addiction, in some way. Everybody’s going to be addicted to something, at some point, or all the time — we always have an addiction, whether it’s playing music, or creating, or heroin, or Flappy Bird, we have to have these things that we repeatedly go to in order to be happy, productive people. Because you can’t be on all the time; you have to have something your brain is ready to go to. And I feel like a lot of the responsibility of being a functional adult is picking the right addiction. Being addicted to creating is fantastic — like if you have that moment where otherwise you just like, sort of fall to Flappy Bird, you’re like, “Well I’m not doing anything → Flappy Bird” “I’m not doing anything → Watch TV”. If you can occasionally go “I’m not doing anything → Make something”, that’s wonderful. And that’s the thing that I would encourage. And of course, not 100% of the time, because Star Trek: The Next Generation isn’t going to rewatch itself.
Well, I do try to fall to creating things… before I moved in with Joey I was often either writing code or poetry or editing videos during my spare time. Now that I’m here, I do a lot of that (interspersed with applying for jobs, and unpacking my 37 boxes of stuff, which arrived about three weeks ago) during the work day, and we do things together during our spare time (I think Joey is a good addiction to pick though.) That’s usually either listening to podcasts, watching TV, or doing cryptic crosswords or other puzzles. So I’m watching a lot more TV than I used to, and yet, still had time to update two apps and release a new one. 🤔 Maybe the key to productivity is not having a job (but I do plan to contribute financially to this household eventually. I know you’re reading this, Joey!)
Anyway, after seeing the great Luke Ski premiere his song about Star Trek: Lower Decks at FuMPFest, we started watching Lower Decks together. We got to about episode 9 before we realised that I just didn’t remember enough Star Trek to get enough of the jokes. When I was a kid, if I happened to turn the TV on and see Star Trek (usually The Original Series, but sometimes The Next Generation) was on, I’d watch it, but I don’t ever remember knowing when it would be on and making a point to watch it. I’m not sure I had that much control over the TV. So, I watched some of Star Trek: The Next Generation, at least 30 years ago, but the only characters I really remembered were Data, Geordi La Forge, and Jean-Luc Picard.
I’ve been going on JoCo Cruise since it started in 2011, and Wil Wheaton has been on most of them, but I had no memory of his character Wesley Crusher. I read his book of episode recaps, Memories of the Future, because it was a freebie with the cruise, but I didn’t remember the episodes, or many of the characters in them. A year or so after the cruise started, I spotted a dress in a regular clothing store in Geneva that seemed vaguely Star-Trek-esque, googled a bit to confirm it, bought an official combadge prop to put on it and some boots to wear with it, and wore it on the cruise and at a few other events. I certainly felt like Star Trek was a familiar part of my life, but didn’t remember many specifics about it.
So… in mid-October, Joey and I decided to (re?)watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, and read Wil’s recap of each episode after we watched it. It was really fun, and the only things that seemed familiar were parts I’d either read about in Wil’s book, or knew from songs, memes, YouTubeclips, and general cultural osmosis. I had a few vague things in my head that I thought I remembered from watching it before, but never actually found them in the show.
That is, until the final double episode, ‘All Good Things…’! I recognised that one from the very first scene, and remembered enough to predict roughly what was going to happen. I suspect some specific friends showed it to me when I visited them in either France or Amsterdam as an adult. But I vaguely remember not knowing who some of the characters were when I watched it previously.
During the two months or so when Star Trek: The Next Generation was our go-to, Joey would often sing Blake Hodgett’s Star Trek: The Next Generation Episode Guide and also a song in Hebrew written by a comedy group called Hipopotam and set to the TNG theme tune. I mentioned these on social media and a friend who was learning Hebrew asked about the latter song. Since it doesn’t otherwise exist on the internet, Joey sang it and figured out some MIDI instrumentation, and I made a bilingual lyric video for it, which is below:
So you see, rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation can also result in making something! I had to restart Final Cut Pro several times while making this, because sometimes it would seem to get confused by all the titles (some parts have six separate title elements) and not let me edit or preview them properly.
I also made another small thing. In the episode “Journey’s End”, Wesley Crusher (who by this point has the voice I recognise as Wil Wheaton’s!) said “Maybe I am sick of following rules and regulations! Maybe I’m sick of living up to everyone else’s expectations! Did you ever think of that?!” and I thought this had some good rhyme and rhythm to it, so here’s a poem I made from it:
Maybe I am sick of following rules and regulations! Maybe I am sick of living up to expectations! Maybe it’s not starships where I’ll fly until I splat. Maybe other planes, though, did you ever think of that?!
I won’t explain the last line, because it’s a spoiler (that I already knew about from Wil’s book.)
Some things that I did or noticed while watching Star Trek: The Next Generation for what seemed to be the first time:
I’d say, ‘Hey, I know that guy!’ whenever I saw Wil Wheaton in the credits. I don’t know him, really, but we’ve interacted a few times on the cruise, I’ve read or seen him read things he’s written, and I’ve listened to his podcast and some books he’s narrated. When we started watching the show, I knew him better than I knew his character.
The lines on the top of the front of the uniforms in the first season make it look like they’re all wearing capes.
I understand what Wil meant about those sweaters. Wow.
My dress, black with red along the top and down one side, is closest to either a Starfleet cadet uniform or a Deep Space Nine uniform. I haven’t seen Deep Space Nine (aside from maybe the pilot when it was on TV) but there was a crossover episode during The Next Generation. This means I do have the correct combadge for it, contrary to what somebody told me once.
Spot (Data’s cat) changed sex at least once, probably twice but I wasn’t as sure about it the first time.
If I ever do linguistic field work, I would want to do it in a cool jacket like the one Picard started wearing in “Darmok”.
Brent Spiner (who plays Data) sometimes plays four or five different characters (two with the same costume and makeup) in one episode and they barely even look alike. Meanwhile I can’t tell the difference between one brown-haired clean-shaven white male Hollywood actor (probably named Chris) and another. I can’t usually tell which parts of a TV performance come from the actors, but I’m fairly sure Mr. Spiner is good at acting.
According to my YouTube year in review, in 2024 I uploaded 258 videos, and got 161.1K views, 125 new subscribers, 1005 likes, 131 comments, and 1036 shares. Compare this with 2023, when I uploaded 261 videos, got 216.6k views, 156 new subscribers, 2022 likes, 135 comments, and 1600 shares — quite similar in most stats, but twice as many comments somehow? What this mostly means is, I sure upload a lot, and that one video sure gets a lot of attention. The new videos are mostly concert footage, so don’t take as much effort as it sounds, though I do spend a fair bit of my free time on them for a few months after the JoCo Cruise.
I’ve joined Bluesky, as that seems to be where a lot of the fun microblogging is going on these days. I should probably change it to use this domain but I haven’t got around to it yet. Posts from this blog will be automatically shared there, on mathstodon, and I think (I’m not sure, as I set it up after my last post) my facebook fan page. I’m not sure if I’ll keep posting them on X, as it can’t be done automatically and it’s getting to be a bit of a pain to keep up with — I get too many notifications from people I’ve never followed, no matter how many times I attempt to turn that off.
On December 24th, Joey and I would have been together in person for a total of 365 days! I might post on the day with an updated Lifetiler graphic, but given how long it’s taken me to write all this, maybe I won’t.
I should probably release an iOS version of Lifetiler, but instead I dove headlong into an app that a friend wanted, and then, just when I had a reasonable proof of concept, dove tailshort out of it again to do Advent of Code and LeetCode exercises.
I’ve heard people complain that job interviews are all LeetCode these days and everyone has memorised LeetCode, but I had not encountered that and didn’t really know what it was until now. But I had a few initial job interviews, and was explicitly told that LeetCode would be a good way to prepare for the next round, so I tried it and actually found it quite fun. I’ve mentioned before that I prefer coding in an interview rather than making yet another JSON-to-TableView app as a take-home exercise.
This is also my first time doing Advent of Code. I planned to do it in Python because it’s probably about time I learnt that language, but then I did the first day’s puzzles in a spreadsheet and the next four days’ in Swift. Maybe I’ll switch to Python at some point, but it’ll be more difficult as I progress through the harder puzzles.
LeetCode and Advent of Code have different kinds of challenge that are interesting for different reasons. LeetCode stays at roughly the same level of difficulty (there are I think three different levels, but that’s about it), cares about how efficiently your code runs, and will tell you the right output when your code gets it wrong. And once you get it right, you can read about ways to do it better. On the other hand, Advent of Code puzzles get gradually harder each day, don’t care about efficiency (you run the code on your own machine and just enter an answer) but also won’t tell you the answer, so you just have to keep reasoning about your code until you figure out what could be wrong with it. They also have a backstory as to why you’re solving a given problem, rather than just an abstract requirement.
Do you see why I don’t blog very often? It’s because every time I do, the post ends up being very long and taking most of my day, which is because I don’t blog very often. I think it’s time to end this one!
Creative Output 
