Dan Q
This checkin to GL4ZB5G9 Blowing Away the Cobwebs reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Should have been easy, but not one but TWO cars were parked right in the way of the cache… and one of them was being unloaded by it’s owners at the time! I stood around with my bike, looking like a wally, until they went away, and then squeezed past to find the cache. TFTC.
This checkin to GL4ZB56N Zed's Pico Cache reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Wonderful little cache in a devious little hiding place. Looked in the right place several times before I thought to let a curious finger do the exploring for me! Got strange looks from passers-by and so had to pretend to be on the phone… Great cache: thanks!
This checkin to GL4ZB4T2 University Challenge 5 (munch munch) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
I’ve visited dozens of times – I only live around the corner – but never realised that it was a virtual cache. Picture doesn’t include me nor my GPSr because (a) my GPSr (on my phone) is my camera and (b) I couldn’t find anybody to take the picture for me (there was only a confused-looking traffic warden around). So you’ll have to suffice with a picture of the landmark itself…
This checkin to GL4ZB20J Famished Equine reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Found without lid nor magnets, soaking wet, buried in pile of leaves: this one’s a goner. I’m removing the cache and I’ll arrange to get it back to it’s owner as soon as possible, but until then this cache should be considered absent!
This checkin to GL4ZB1B2 University Challenge 14 (Poly) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Excellent cache! One of my favourites of the day’s hunt: and I was so glad I wore laced shoes, as you suggest, because that made all the difference when it came to retrieving and replacing this fabulous little cache. Log was full – couldn’t find space to write – so I’ve instead taken a picture of this imaginative little cache (warning: photo contains minor spoilers about what you’re looking for).
This checkin to GL4ZB0YP H. H. Park reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
I love this park in the summertime, but in the depths of a wet winter it was more than a little difficult to get to the cache, and involved wading through ankle-deep water in the swampy area around the cache! Persevered, though, and found it in the end! TFTC.
This checkin to GL4ZB0KR Milham Ford recreation ground reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
The goddesses of the satellites were with me! On this, my second cache of the day (and many of the others I found today), my GPSr took me right up to within a metre of the cache!
This checkin to GL4ZB099 just visiting... reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Like the previous visitor, I parked my bike up on the “wrong” side of the steam, but thankfully I was able to hop across without too much difficulty and find this little cache.
This checkin to GC1J956 Sliding in the quarry reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
Far too muddy, I guess: couldn’t even get close! Will try again another time.
This checkin to GC17QTE Britannia - Never At Sea reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
I can’t decipher the numbers! I’ve come up with values for B and C which are too low to be able to deduct some of the values that the formula requires me to… maybe there’s something I’m missing…
This checkin to GC21WAA Famished Equine reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
This cache has been removed as it is no longer intact (lid and magnet missing, camouflage fallen off). Photo included. I’ll arrange to deliver this to the owner so that it can be repaired and replaced, hopefully.
Oh yeah: I changed the look-and-feel of scatmania.org the other week, in case you hadn’t noticed. It’s become a sort-of-traditional January activity for me, these years, to redesign the theme of my blog at this point in the year.
This year’s colours are black, white, greys, and red, and you’ll note also that serifed fonts are centre-stage again, appearing pretty-much-universally throughout the site for the first time since 2004. Yes, I know that it’s heavier and darker than previous versions of the site: but it’s been getting fluffier and lighter year on year for ages, now, and I thought it was time to take a turn. You know: like the economy did.
Aside from other cosmetic changes, it’s also now written using several of the new technologies of HTML5 (I may put the shiny new logo on it, at some point). So apologies to those of you running archaic and non-standards-compliant browsers (I’m looking at you, Internet Explorer 6 users) if it doesn’t look quite right, but really: when your browser is more than half as old as the web itself, it’s time to upgrade.
I’ve also got my site running over IPv6 – the next generation Internet protocol – for those of you who care about those sorts of things. If you don’t know why IPv6 is important and “a big thing”, then here’s a simple explanation. Right now you’re probably viewing the IPv4 version: but if you’re using an IPv6-capable Internet connection, you might be viewing the IPv6 version. You’re not missing out, either way: the site looks identical: but this is just my tiny contribution towards building the Internet of tomorrow.
(if you really want to, you can go to ipv6.scatmania.org to see the IPv6 version – but it’ll only work if your Internet Service Provider is on the ball and has set you up with an IPv6 address!)
Something I’ve been thinking about, recently; presented in three parts, for clarity:
Part One – Polyamory and Negotiations
There’s a widely-understood guideline in nonmonogamous relationships that you should always be willing to ask for what you want, not what you think you can get away with. To me, it feels to be a particularly valuable maxim. Like the majority of suggestions touted by the polyamorous community, it’s a tip that holds value for both monogamous and nonmonogamous relationships… but is naturally of more importance to those which are nonmonogamous because these have a tendency to depend more-heavily on honest and open negotiation.
I’m sure I don’t have to spell out to you why asking for what you want (rather than what you think you can get away with) is important. But just in case I do, here’s the three top reasons, as far as I see it:
There are times that it’s okay not to ask for what you want, too, though. Sometimes it’s hard to be sure what you want; and it’s fine to say you need time to think about it. Sometimes
we change our minds (shocking, I know!), and it’s more-admirable to be honest than consistent. Sometimes there are more important things to deal with. There’s no rush.
But it works. The more specific you can be – even to the point of “too much information” – the better this kind of communication can work, because the better your partner understands
you, the better you both can negotiate. As ‘dirty surface’ writes, “I’d like to get my butt caned by a professional Dom while you watch once
every six months or so” represents a very different commitment of time, money and emotional energy than what someone might picture when you say “Let’s hire and share a sex worker
regularly.”
Part Two – The Anchoring Effect
There’s a known psychological phenomenon called the anchoring effect. In order to demonstrate it, I’m going to plagiarise an example used in this article – if you want to see the effect in action; don’t click that link yet! Just follow the instructions below:
You’ll get the answer a little further down the page. But first, it’s time to come clean about something: when you clicked that link to WolframAlpha, you’ll have gone to one of two different pages. There’s a 50% chance that you’ll have found yourself looking at the population data of the United Kingdom (about 62 million), and a 50% chance that you’ll have found yourself looking at the population data of Switzerland (about 7½ million).
If you originally saw the United Kingdom and you guessed lower, or you originally saw Switzerland and guessed higher, you were right: the population of Venezuela is somewhere between the two. But if we took all of the guesses by all of the people who correctly guessed lower than the United Kingdom, and all the people who correctly guessed higher than Switzerland, then – statistically speaking – we’d probably see that the people who looked at the United Kingdom first would make higher guesses as to the population of Venezuela than those people who looked at Switzerland first.
The population of Venezuela’s about 29 million people. What did you guess? And what country were you shown first, when you clicked the link? Leave me a comment and let me know…
The anchoring effect is explored in detail by Ariely, Loewenstein, and Prelec 2004, in which studies are performed on groups of people who are told a (randomly-determined) price for some goods, and then asked to state how much they’d be willing to pay for them: those people who are given higher random values will consistently offer more money for the goods than those who were told a lower value.
It’s not a new idea. For hundreds of years, at least, salespeople have practiced the not-dissimilar door-in-the-face technique (sort-of the opposite of the more well-known foot-in-the-door technique), in which an unsatisfactory offer is made first in order to make the second offer – which is actually what the salesperson wants to sell – seem more desirable than it actually is.
Part Three – Hey, But That Means…
Taking the two previous parts of this article at face value can quickly lead to an unwelcome conclusion: we’re more likely to get what we want when we ask for more than what we want – and then back down to a false compromise position. A greedy but carefully-deployed “salesman” approach has been shown to work wonders when you’re negotiating for a pay rise, selling a product, motivating volunteers, or getting people to under- or over-estimate the value of goods and services. Surely it’d work when negotiating in a relationship, too?
“Hey, honey: it’d really mean a lot to me if I could could have a threesome with you and your mother…”
“What? No way! That’s disgusting.”
“Okay, okay, then… I suppose I could make do with having sex with your sister.”
Despite the extremity of the example above, the answer is that for the individual, this strategy can work: I’ve known people who’ve fallen victim to exactly this kind of con. Worse yet, I suspect that there are perpetrators of this kind of strategy who don’t even realise that they’re doing it: they’re just responding in the Pavlovian style to the “rewards” that they’re getting by continuing to act in what it – let’s face it – an unscrupulous and unethical manner.
Does it work, then? Yes, more’s the pity. But everything it gets for you is something that it’s taking away from your partner, or from your relationship. And maybe that’s the kind of strain that the relationship can take, but there are always limits.
Me? I’ll stick to what I believe in: so far as I can, putting my hand on the table and saying, “Here’s what I’m playing with: what’ve you got?” It’s a trusting and diplomatic strategy, but it’s the best solution to finding the best middle-ground for everyone. There are those who find that it makes them feel too vulnerable – at too much risk of their openness being used against them – to try to say what they want so openly. And to them, I say: if you don’t trust your lover with the way that you feel, then working on that trust that should be your first priority.
Now get on with loving one another, y’all!
They just gosub without return. That is, of course, a joke (with all due apologies to those of you to whom it means nothing), but there’s a kernel of truth in the saying. In their own way, programmers are like authors or artists in that their work can easily outlive them, and their unique and distinct style can be found in their creations: and in that created by those that learn from or imitate them.
This morning I was working on some legacy Perl code that holds together a part of a client’s web site. In particular, I was refactoring the code that displays dates and times in an appropriate format, as part of an effort to simplify the code after fixing a bug that would, under some unusual conditions, use the “pm” suffix for morning times (e.g. 11pm, when it means 11am). Under normal circumstances this would have been a simpler job than it was, but this particular piece of software has been passed from developer to developer, and (until it came into my hands) I’m pretty sure that none of them took the time to understand what their predecessors had done. Several different stylistic and semantic styles are used in the code, and several different solutions are used for the same problem, depending on who was in charge at any given time. In short, the code’s a mess, but the client is on a tight budget and can generally only afford to pay for the minimum amount of work, and not for the sweeping overhaul that the system so badly needs.
I came across a particular line of code, today (evidence, perhaps, of a previous developer looking into a related issue to the one with which I was tasked):
$leu_something .= $hour . " - " . $amorpm;
Even without the developer’s name embedded within the variable name, I could have told you who wrote this code because of its distinct style. Even this single line has a defining appearance of its own, to the trained eye. To illustrate this, consider that the line could equally have been written in any of the following ways (among hundreds of others, without even looking at the optional space characters and interchangeable types of quotation marks used), and would have functioned identically:
$leu_something = $leu_something .= $hour . " - " . $amorpm;
$leu_something .= "${hour} - ${amorpm}";
$leu_something = join($leu_something, $hour, " - ", $amorpm);
$leu_something .= sprintf('%s - %s', $hour, $amorpm);
Some of these methods have specific advantages or disadvantages, but all have the exact same fundamental meaning meaning. However, even from a glance I could tell that this code belonged to the former developer named Leu (and not any of the other developers whose names I’ve seen in the project) because of the style in which he chose to write it.
Non-programmers often fail to understand why I describe programming as being as much an art as a science. The work of a programmer has been compared to the work of a poet, and I agree with this sentiment. Even merely on a superficial level, both computer code and poetry:
Not only that, program code can be beautiful. I’ve examined code before that’s made me smile, or laugh, or that has saddened me, or that has inspired me. I shan’t argue that it’s on a par with the standard of spoken-language poetry: but then, programming languages are not designed to appeal to the pathos, and are at a natural disadvantage. Sometimes the comments for a piece of code can in themselves carry a beauty, too: or they can serve simply to help the reader comprehend a piece of code, in the same way as one can sometimes find guidance in the interpretation of a poem from somebody else’s research.
However, it’s possible to say things with code that one simply can’t convey in the same way, using a spoken language. To prove this point, I’ve composed a short haiku in the medium of the Ruby programming language. For this purpose, I’m defining a haiku as a poem whose lines contain 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively. It’s an existentially nihilistic piece called Grind:
def grind(age = 0)
die if age == 78
grind(age + 1); end
Vocalised, it would be read as follows:
Def grind: age equals zero,
Die if age equals seventy-eight,
Grind (age plus one); end.
I enjoy the subtlety its use of recursion to reinforce the idea that every year of your life gives you a bigger burden to carry (and a larger amount of memory consumed). This subtlety does not adequately translate to a spoken language.
The line of code I showed you earlier, though, is neither interesting nor remarkable, in itself. What makes it interesting to me is that it persisted – until today, when I removed it – in this piece of software. The author, Leu, died several years ago. But there will exist software that he wrote, being read again and again by tireless machines on a daily basis, for years to come.
I wonder how long the code I write today will live.
This week, the Internet went mildly crazy for a few minutes when people suddenly started discovering that their astrological sign might not have been what they previously thought. My favourite line in the linked article is “…the Minneapolis Star Tribute published an article, stating that our horoscopes are wrong,” to which my first thought was, “Well, duh.” This all comes about because when Ptolemy accidentally invented contemporary astrology, almost two millenia ago, he never specified whether his system should be based on the calendar year, or on the actual relative positions of the stars. While the calendar year has pretty much remained the same since Ptolemy’s time, our solar system has rotationally drifted slightly relative to the rest of the galaxy, and so the constellations aren’t quite in line with the calendar any more.
In theory, at least, if we were to plot a sun sign by the stars (as is practiced in some Eastern astrology) rather than by the calendar (as is practiced in most Western astrology), that’d make me not a Capricorn, as you might expect, but a Sagittarius.
I had a friend, once, who attached a not-inconsiderable amount of importance to her horoscope. However, she had a strange approach to the subject. I remember one particular morning when she got up and read her horoscope in the newspaper. She didn’t like what she read, and decided that it must therefore be wrong, and instead looked up the one on Teletext instead. Still unsatisfied, she eventually looked up her horoscope on the web, and – finally finding a fortune that she was happy to accept as hers – accepted it.
Thankfully, there’s no cause for concern for me, because I’m an Aquarius. I was born a Capricorn, but I never really felt comfortable as one, so I had my star sign changed to one that I felt suited me better. I have a certificate and everything, printed on an old inkjet printer and folded up in a drawer ever since. Once or twice, people have tried to tell me that it doesn’t work; that you can’t just “change” your star sign simply because you want it to be different. When this happens, I simply point out that my bit of paper is just as official, as believable, and as scientific as astrology is in the first place. And despite the (disputed) idea that our star signs might all have changed, as has flooded Facebook, my scrap of paper still says “Aquarius” on it, as relevant today as it always has been!