mh-z | web-log

Freeze-dried apples, with nothing else added. Seems healthy, although it tastes sugary. But these are natural fruit sugars, so we can rest easy (not that there’s really a difference). Each 10-ounce baglet contains a cup of apples, or so it says. And these are somewhat addictive, although not too filling. I just discovered this healthy snack in our local snack rack, and have eaten five so far today. And I’m still hungry. On my sixth, now. How many apples are in a cup of apples? Or more simply, how many cups of apple-matter are in one apple? Not enough to fill me up, that’s for sure.

http://google.com/movies

I didn’t even know this existed! Since when was it available? Goodbye moviefone.com. Goodbye, movies.yahoo.com. I’ve had enough of your flashy ads and graphics and overloadedness when all I wanted was to quickly look up movie data. Each listing even has a link to IMDB. Can’t beat that.

Something that bothered me about I Am Legend is… why do the infected humans wear clothes?

A powerful movie. Did this get poor reviews? Or not do as well at the box office as was expected? I’m not sure why. Sure, you can question the science behind it all (as one friend did), but really, that’s not what matters. The scenes of New York sans people were incredibly well done. Going in, I didn’t know much about what to expect — perhaps I thought this would be “just another zombie movie” with some sort of twist, or with pretty graphics — but it went above and beyond any vague expectations I might have had. There were no gratuitous “boo!” moments intended to startle the audience, just an overall sense of tenseness, exploration, tragedy. The movie is spent following a protagonist testing the properties of and learning about the world he finds himself in, and it’s that global sense of exploration I like that’s often missing from movies. (Legend delivers that in spades.) It goes a bit too much in the “blockbuster” direction, but everything is just so… polished.

The doctor is in!

mjh: Do you want to fail?
her: i think part of me does
her: part of me thinks thats what i’m supposed to do
her: part of me thinks that i’m not like everyone
her: everyone is successful
her: i don’t feel successful
mjh: How do you define success?
mjh: If you don’t want to be successful, then by not being successful, you are achieving your goal!
mjh: So that would make you successful.

The woman in the passport wing of my local post office was nice. She reminded me to check my parking meter based on the time she’d seen me walk in. She posed me oh-so-carefully for my Polaroid photo: “Turn your head a millimeter to the left, okay, now up a tiny bit, no, a few angstroms down, good.” (Those weren’t her exact words.) The photo came out well. I wanted to ask her out, even though she is probably 20 years older than I am. Maybe I’m just kidding.

Experience points gained from:

1. Installing and driving with tire chains.
2. Lodging in a real lodge, i.e., less than 20 meters from slopes/lift.
3. Rolling around in snow, jumping back into hot tub. (Observation: causes pain!)
4. Preparing over twice as much food (with five people) as would have filled us to capacity, including broiled steaks.
5. Eating all of the above.
6. Digging my car out from under a mountain of powder.
7. Extremes of soggy clothing.
8. Smoothness of driving after chains are finally removed.
9. General lack of soreness.

Experience points applied to:

1. Increased snowboarding skill.

How about this? You’re presented with a page displaying a Boggle grid, and the solver generates both all possible words, and all possible words as if the board were jittered about in several ways. Our training program now has two lists of words, one of which is the list of words which actually exist, and another is a list of words which almost exist, but not quite. You’re presented one-at-a-time with a randomly-ordered mix of words from both lists, and your task is to classify words into “valid” and “invalid” based on whether they can be found on the board you see. This might take a great deal of thought at first, but ought to start becoming somewhat automatic at some point, as your brain rewires itself to be good at finding specific words in Boggle grids. It seems to me that this should improve performance in the game, without the “searching… searching…” dead time that occurs when actually playing, while the subconscious does its stuff.

Not that this is inherently useful; it’s just a mental-exercise sort of thing. In general I think there’s a very large benefit to the task of learning anything which can be realized by taking complex tasks and breaking them down into the simplest sub-tasks, which can then be drilled. Once each sub-task is mastered, specific sub-tasks can be combined and then drilled at the same time, in different combinations, until the complex skill as a whole comes together and seems like second nature. Because our brains are inherently poor at context-switching, it’s better to train each skill in as narrowly-focused a manner as possible. For example, I can play Tetris for hours and not really have to think — I’ve “automaticized” playing the game. The same goes for shifting gears in a manual-transmission car. Pianists don’t need to figure out how the notes in a musical score map to keys on the keyboard, they just know and play. (It’s said that Bach, I believe (or some other classical composer) was able to actually hear music while merely looking at a score.) And the same goes for many activities. Like typing. I think of the words I want to express, and my fingers automatically know where to go to press the right keys on the keyboard to emit them.

What if I were to turn my keyboard upside-down? How long would it take me to learn to type anywhere close to my current speed? Would the new positioning of the spacebar interfere with whatever speed I could attain, or would I begin to adapt to it pretty well? How long would it take?

What if everyday when I arrived at work, my keyboard (right-side-up, again, for the sake of sanity), had a new, randomized arrangement of keys? Could I learn how to learn a new keyboard layout very quickly and then begin typing at a decent speed on this new, randomized keyboard layout in a short amount of time? Interesting to ponder (as I lie awake and wonder).

Back to the piano example. I’d prefer to drill “mapping notes on a musical staff to their corresponding keys”, until I can essentially do that without thinking. Then I’ll move on to quickly reading rhythms. Then I’ll move on to playing chords. Throughout this, I can work on exercises that deal with reading/playing different notes with both hands, simultaneously. And finally, I can put it all together.

Contrast the above with the typical way of learning piano. The student starts with exceedingly simple pieces, tries to master them, and then moves on. But I find that once I know a simple piece well enough to have mastered it, I’m not reading the notes any more, I’m just playing by following the muscle memory which produces the song. What I really want is to learn how to read the notes, and mastering simple pieces is not the way to do that. Hard pieces, on the other hand, are too daunting to learn notes from. What’s a poor overly-idealistic piano student to do?

So I’ve had a lot of fun recently playing Rock Band for the X-Box. If the level of satisfaction which comes from learning complicated drum rhythms or button presses on the fake guitar could be built into a system for learning how to play a real piano keyboard, think how much easier it would be to learn, and how much more progress young kids who have hours of piano lessons foisted upon them would make. (I say this from personal experience, having had piano lessons for a couple years when in elementary/high school. That I didn’t learn all that much from these lessons is both partly a matter of motivation (to practice, which was a chore to me, at the time, as much as I wish now that I had done so, back then), and a matter of how the subject was meant to be learned — by playing those simple songs, referenced above. I generally ended up playing by ear what the teacher had demonstrated, and so never became all that great at reading music). I know there was that Miracle Piano keyboard a while back, but that’s probably dated by today’s technological standards. Why not an X-Box game with a MIDI<->USB adapter for plugging in a standard electronic keyboard? Does such a thing exist?

Big-name comics (anecdotally based on a sample size of two) generally don’t seem to be as funny as no-name comics. I was at a show last night where Sarah Silverman (whom I wasn’t all that familiar with) and Drew Carey made appearances, and neither had the same energy as the rest of the folks in their bits. Perhaps because we’re used to the big-names’ styles, from seeing them on television, and we don’t experience as much unexpectedness from them, as in, “I wonder what this person will say next!” to make us laugh when they utter something completely random and inane, compared with the characteristic utterance we would stereotypically expect. At least, that (non-unexpectedness) was the case with Carey, but Silverman on the other hand, being pretty unknown to me at least, was nonetheless just inherently not all that funny. Random, yes, and perhaps funny in an intellectual sense (or maybe not), but definitely not in the laugh-out-loud sort of way.

I don’t remember the names of any of the interstitial comedians/comediennes who were clever/funny.

I drive past the Cloverfield freeway exit all the time, and apparently the movie is named after that street/exit.

I was impressed, but I think a great portion of the audience didn’t appreciate the movie for what it was supposed to be. I heard a great deal of grumbling the moment the final scene ended, as everyone fled the theater in pursuit of more interesting activities, like driving home at 2:45 AM, I suppose. On principle I generally stay through the credits (sometimes to the annoyance of friends), and I’m glad I did in this case, as the “Cloverfield Overture” music (the only score the movie had) was powerful.

The camcorder-look effect was flawlessly done, and the overall style was consistent throughout. I really can’t come up with a single complaint. Sure, the characters were one-dimensional and annoying, but that wasn’t the point. Cloverfield is a cleverly done bit of homage to alien-invasion and monster movies of eras past.

Nice background music to this site (and good photos). The song is “Fly Me Away” by Goldfrapp. There are two versions you can buy from Amazon, and if you want this song be careful to not get the “Radio Edit” version, which in my opinion is inferior.

That’s my main criticism of Amazon’s download system, by the way. Actually, two criticisms:

1. Same criticism I have of the iTunes Music Store: The short (20-second) clip of the song you’re evaluating for potential purchase is very often inadequate when it comes to figuring out whether (a) it’s precise song you’re looking for, and/or (b) it’s any good.
2. Once purchased, it’s impossible to “return” a song. This would have to be on the honor system, but I’d happily delete all those wrong versions of songs I’ve accidentally downloaded and get my dollar back for each. And I say “accidentally downloaded” because the 20-second clip is too short to figure out if I’ve found the correct song.

KF: How late did you end up staying Sat. night? That place was too loud.

MH: Saturday night we were there until the place closed and they kicked us out. So my “secret” (not really, because I’m always eager to share/commiserate with people if they seem interested, because I don’t know how folks in general can go to clubs/bars/concerts with music/etc. frequently and not have major hearing loss given the volume at which stuff is usually played) is that I (almost) always use earplugs. If you get these particular cheap green foam ones from Sav-On or Rite-Aid, you can cut or bite (which is harder) off the tips, and then they don’t stick out of your ears and look silly. Easy to put in and take out. You (KF) didn’t even notice I had them. Works just as well. Everything becomes nice and quiet (although in somewhat of a muffled sense), and you still feel the bass as before, if that’s your thing. And you (KF) complain even though the inherent (earplug-less) volume of sound in this club seemed (to me at least) to not be nearly as loud as many places I’ve been to, which puts things in a minor bit of perspective. I should carry around extras because you’re far from the first friend who’s complained about things being too loud — see, it’s not that we’re crotchety old people complaining about the volume of the movie (”back when I whuz a boy… our movies were silent!”), it’s that I intensely dislike the sensation of ringing in my ears the next day, of things sounding weird and muffled; sounds like the jangling of keys, or running water, or even regular old music don’t sound quite right; what’s disconcerting (no pun intended) is knowing that although eventually hearing will return to close to normal, it’ll never quite be 100% normal… maybe 99.9% of what it was before, at best, but given that I enjoy listening to (normal volume) music, why accumulate that hearing loss, little by little, every time I go out to a place like this, when I can have the best of both worlds and enjoy the other aspects of typically loud venues, but in my own, quiet(er) world? End of rant.

Until a moment ago I thought this place was called Cosmic Pizza, but really it’s Nova Express Cafe. And it’s great. I had some sort of chicken salad dish (having already had pizza earlier that day), which was really top notch. I’m very picky about salad dressing (a story for another time), and their dressing impressed me. There was a plasma ball next to our table and I remarked that I wished more restaurants could go all-out and have a real theme like this.

Yelp reviews.

Above+left: A photo of the waitress who served us.

“Hey back when I was at UCLA we didn’t have email threads like this! We didn’t even have email, or computers, or machines to do our laundry, or flush toilets, or ‘modern medicine’ or… And we amused ourselves by racing turtles all day! By candlelight!” -mjh

I truly wonder how people have time to watch television at all.

You were just in a dream I had. I was telling you about these extra scenes they had at the end of the movie “Back to the Future part III”, but that I had never seen when I was little because we taped the movie off TV and somehow had missed that section.

This was interesting because the dream referenced another dream that I had had over a month ago, but that I had “forgotten”. In the dream I had just now, that other dream made a reappearance; this fits my theory about dreams and memories in general, and how we supposedly so frequently forget them, whereas I don’t think that’s the case. I think instead those memories become walled off, like bubbles, with no “bridges” into them (which you can argue is like forgetting, and you may have a point, based on how you define “forget”). Sometimes a specific thing (a smell, an image, a song) will create a bridge into a memory bubble, and that memory will suddenly be clear and vivid, because it was never really gone, just sectioned off. (Remembered? But this is not the same experience. I am talking about complete memories which have become disconnected, as opposed to memories which become fragmentary and faint.)

In the original dream, we were in some sort of airport or train station with vast multiple tiers, each shorter than the one below, at one end of the station. Each tier was like a floor in a mall (except plushly carpeted in dark red), with stores far off in the distance on all three sides, fading into a tunnel in the back. We were on a certain tier, and as we wandered off to the side, came to an exhibit reminiscent of Disney’s “Tomorrowland” environments. Picture “now” as being the 80’s; we get on a train where visitors are taken from one environment to the next, where we can see still 3-D scenes projected from future eras. Angular buildings, roads, people.

In the new dream, the scenes experienced “firsthand” in the prior dream became part of my memory of that movie that I had seen, and I described the movie to you, and how I had seen it again recently with these new scenes at the end which I had missed.

I find it interesting how dreams not only play with images and stories, but construct whole memories out of bits and pieces, those pieces often being past dreams, those past dreams often having been long “forgotten” in waking life.

I was woken up one morning by what sounded like a lawn mower, or rather, a tree chipper right outside my window. Turns out it was my neighbor either parking or unparking his new Lamborghini, and apparently the parking spot is tight enough and the car wide enough that it takes him fully ten minutes to maneuver the thing in or out. Either that, or he’s new to the whole stick shift business and is being extra careful so as not to engage the clutch too quickly and stall while simultaneously crashing into the wall of the next building. He alternately parks a huge Jeep Wrangler in the same spot which today I noticed says “Unlimited Edition” below the model name on its side, as if that’s something to be extra proud of. If cars (and art prints, and other things, like, oh… money) generally advertise and pride themselves on their being “limited edition”, why would you want, on the other hand, to proclaim that you’re “unlimited”? As in, “nope, I’m just your average vehicle, they’ll make as many copies of me as they can sell, and then some, nothing special here, move along now!”. I guess this fits the statement:

If you’ve got it, flaunt it. If you haven’t got it, flaunt it anyway.

Which is like the old videogame saw:

If it moves, shoot it. If it doesn’t move, shoot it anyway.

And I now segue into talking about how I am not going to segue into talking about videogames, or the Segway, or anything clever like that. Or not.

I’d like some gold bricks, unlimited edition.

But that would devalue the gold and make it worthless, so no.

I’m guilty of pouring various substances into the potted plant/tree outside my office, so that I can throw the empty soda can or glass or plastic drink bottle into a nearby recycling bin without having to make a long and arduous trek to a non-nearby sink. The plant seems to be thriving, so I speculate that Coke (both diet and non-), Mountain Dew, Dr. Pepper and Snapple either don’t harm vegetation or else contribute useful minerals, or maybe it’s just the drinks’ water content.

I doubt caffeine causes plants to grow any differently, but is there some drug that interferes with plants’ precise growth patterns (the angles of the leaves, the ubiquitous “golden ratio”, and so on) to produce something analogous to these spider webs? Plants don’t have brains or “decide” to grow in certain ways because of neuronal firing, so chemicals that affect neurons probably have no specific effect on plants.

Dreaming defragments the mind.

Washing dishes defragments the soul, to some small degree.

If I were to ask you, “if you had to or got the chance to write a book, what would it be about?”, what would you answer?

If I were to ask you, “if I were to ask you, ‘if you had to or got the chance to write a book, what would it be about?’, what would you answer?”, what would you answer?

When I find one thing I like a lot at a restaurant, I’ll always order that same thing every time I go back. It’s not that I have anything against trying new things; I just don’t want to be compelled to finish something that I don’t like, should dislike be the case, and should said dislike of said item be insufficient to compel disposal thereof in which case I would definitely not be as happy after “suffering” through consumption of the item than had I ordered the “normal but boring” thing I always like in the first place, that would be unfortunate. The benefit of eating with friends is that I get to sample new dishes in small bites, and decide whether something (e.g., an enchilada) is worth ordering “the whole enchilada of” next time around.

I want to live in a house numbered 1337. Work is close (1333), but that earns us no cigar.

I like Santa Ana winds, and walking in them at night. Warm, dry air. When it’s windy here, large dead palm fronds litter the streets, and when driving one should probably strive to avoid them. I saw, or rather heard, a pickup trick driving by with a large palm frond trapped underneath the body, scraping the pavement.

I like fog even more than I like Santa Ana winds; the heavier the better. It’s rarely foggy in Santa Monica, though.

On Friday, around the time the sun usually sets, I looked out over the ocean from our balcony and saw the strangest weather phenomenon ever involving the sun setting over the ocean. Firstly, the entire area was blanketed in a thin fog, making the sky opaquely gray. It was dark, impossible to see the sun or any orange-ish or pinkish color one normally associates with sunsets. But despite the gray drabness, the ocean itself was glowing a bright white. The edge was brightest, tapering off into the distance. This likely had something to do with the sun’s light hitting the water behind all the clouds and fog, and reflecting off of the sand at the bottom of the sea. The whole scene was incredibly surreal, like something from a video game or apocalyptic movie, except that were the latter the case, colors such as purple and deep red would abound, except here the picture was painted in shades of gray.

There’s a fun little neighborhood bar three blocks from my apartment. Santa Ana winds clear the air; as I walked back home I was surprised at how many stars I could see in the sky. Then I thought about how many stars I’d be able to see were I on a camping trip, out away from the city. It’s been a while since a good camping trip came my way.

I made some new friends today.

The iPhone is awesome but AT&T’s cellular service is horrific compared to Verizon’s. I can no longer count on a clear, solid static-free signal wherever I go; my conversations now cut out as I hit signal-holes; I can only talk from specific spots inside my apartment (e.g., the signal isn’t good enough to talk while sitting at my desk; I have to go to a certain spot in the middle of the living room); there’s a significant lag when talking.

How do you determine what that lag is? Say to the person at the other end of the line: “Count with me. I’m going to count to ten, and I want you to say the numbers I’m saying at the exact same time as I’m saying them. Ready? Go. One, two, three, four…” Count at the speed of about one number per second. The other person latches on to your rhythm, and speaks your numbers simultaneously when (s)he hears them. So now, you compare the number you’re saying with the delay before you hear the other person say that same number. I never had to perform this exercise with Verizon, because conversations seemed natural — but with AT&T, I noticed that we’d be interrupting each other a lot. The counting exercise showed over a full one-second lag, which is workable but really not acceptable. I remember using a satellite connection to speak with someone in a different country, and there, lags are inevitable, since with the distances involved, going up to and between several satellites, then back down to Earth, even light takes a noticeable amount of time. But down here on Earth, talking to someone in the same city, there’s no reason that there should be such a significant latency.

Still, the interface of the iPhone itself makes up for the abysmal signal quality. (AT&T’s slogan, which is “more bars in more places”, is more accurately “more signal holes in more places”. I’ve found myself saying, “wait, sorry, you cut out for a second, could you say that again?” a lot lately.) I find that the prettiness of the interface has me wanting to call friends I might not have otherwise called, just to be flicking my contact list up and down and tapping on the smoothly rendered names.