Håvard's web site — Index & News

I added sorting to the Essays and Short Stories.

I'm reading Richard Dawkins' latest book, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, which is an anthology of essays or extracts from books written by scientists themselves about science, as opposed to written by non-scientists, and it's excellent. So excellent, in fact, that I've taken the liberty of linking to "On Being the Right Size" (Haldane), "One Self" (Nicholas Humphrey), and an extract from Man in the Universe (Hoyle). As I continue reading, I'm sure I'll add more. (I also added another Gould essay not from the Dawkins anthology, "Size and Shape".)

I've split off the Gaming section of my Links page because it's getting crowded. I added a section for Emulation, and added links to PlayGuy and Gens, a Game Boy and Sega Genesis emulator, respectively. At first I abused the save states something fierce, but I soon discovered that the games are much more enjoyable if one doesn't do that. As a gesture of defiant anachronism, however, I'll continue using my 360 controller, because God damn it, it's such a good controller and I don't care what anybody says. I also added a link to GameFAQs, something I should've done a long time ago.

Oh, and that whole Chrome thang. I added a link to that too.

Did you play Spore yet? I was immensely disappointed. It's sort of interesting at first, but it hypes itself up and then doesn't deliver. No, give me GTA4 instead.

"I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

Good news!

I now live with Even and Uy, two of my best friends. We live on the upper two floors of an apartment (a lady and her child live on the first floor) and have been living here for a week (getting settled in can take some time). Even has pictures.

After many failed attempts I've now gotten RAID set up on my computer! (It was failing to boot. I tried using a secondary RAID setup program in the BIOS, I tried flashing the BIOS, and I tried removing all disks but the ones I was going to set up. After a week of this, that last thing succeeded. So if you are trying to use RAID, the key insight is to remove all disks but the ones you plan to use for RAID. Maybe this is basic knowledge, but it kept me busy for a week, so I can't imagine I'm the only one wrestling with this.) I have two 150 GB WD Raptor disks in striping. Striping means that you split every file into as many parts as you have disks, and distribute them on all the disks. Since I have two disks, an 8MB file will be split in two and while the first 4 megabytes of the file is fetched from the first disk, the second 4 megabytes is fetched from the second disk. The result is blinding speed, but at the cost of risking loss of all data. (If one disk fails, half the data is gone and hence every file will be corrupted. If I had more disks I would use a parity disk, and the magic of XOR gates would solve all my problems.) Now to set up triple-boot with XP, Vista, and Ubuntu.

I've greatly looked forward to Geometry Wars 2 and it does pretty much everything right. In particular, I'm still amazed that it's possible to make a song that is exactly three minutes in duration!

The Links page has three new links: Bjørn Lynne (music), Aural Planet (music), and Encyclopedia Hiigara (encyclopedia). The Computer page was getting stale, so I removed it (the next time I do a complete rebuild of my computer, which I can't afford to now, I'll give it a cool name and a shiny new page).

Amazingly, I've read a book. It's the well-known The Prince by Machiavelli, and I didn't particularly like it, for about the same reasons I don't particularly like the Old Testament. Admittedly the OT is like throwing a hundred kittens into a blender while The Prince is like throwing only one, but that doesn't make it a nice thing to do.

To my delight and surprise, there are two new Wilburers, and in quick succession at that. If you don't know what that means then I suggest you go spelunking.

"Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses."

I bought an HTC Touch cellphone and noticed that my site looked horrible on it, so I whipped together some CSS to make it somewhat readable. It succeeded, but only browsers that obey the "handheld" CSS media type gets it. Aggravatingly this excludes IE. Thankfully it includes Opera Mobile.

I made this update with the phone's stylus, and now my hand hurts. I don't recommend it.

In my long absence I've been reading a lot, and in that course I discovered quite a lot of neato Essays. They are "Politics and the English Language" (Orwell), "The Dragon In My Garage" (Sagan), "Twelve Virtues of Rationality" (Yudkowsky), "The Median Isn't The Message" (Gould), "September 11, 1901" (also Gould), "1967" (the name was given ad hoc since it was Russell's last and he didn't name it), "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (Nicholas Carr), "A Godless Ramble Against the Ditherings of Theologians" (PZ Myers), and "Planet of the Hats" (also Myers). I've also read a lot of short SF stories, some of which I've transcribed and linked to in Short Stories: "If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth...", "History Lesson", "Expedition to Earth" (all three by Clarke), and "Counter Charm" (Peter Phillips). As for books, I've read The Zombie Survival Guide and Expedition to Earth (an anthology book from which I took the Clarke stories).

I cleaned up the Links page a bit, culling dead links and adding some new ones (tools, a deviant artist, The Jefferson Hour, and Cave Story Deluxe). I did the same with my books; I deleted reviews that were only descriptions and didn't contain a recommendation. Sometime I will have to re-read all those and make proper reviews.

As for games, Shadowgrounds and its sequel Shadowgrounds Survivor are awesome (and cheap), available from Steam. The first game has a truly unconventional ending and the second one has interesting protagonists. Apart from that, virtually all my gaming time has been sunk into Ninja Gaiden II. I have all the achievements for it except the one for clearing the game on Path of the Master Ninja. (Which is unfairly difficult. You will have to try it to understand and those who have will nod their weary necks in painful recognition.) So I've updated my little Ninja Gaiden Miscellanea section.

Finally, there's a new item in the Random page's Fun section, Trace Elements. Feel free to send me corrections and suggestions!

Here are some pretty pictures.

• A wren (Malurus cyaneus).
• A Yellow-winged Darter (Sympetrum flaveolum).
• Pretty parrots!
• An MV-22 Osprey refueling.
• A cluster of mountains in Helgeland, Norway called The Seven Sisters (De Syv Søstre in Norwegian). There are actually quite a few geographical formations in the world called this. For instance, some chalk cliffs in England.

"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."

I rearranged the webcomic links into sections of update frequency. A lot of them fell into Haphazard.

I added alexiuss and Philipstraub to the deviantART section of Links.

Joy! Behold the new Readings section, visible in the navigation bar! I put all books, short stories, and essays into databases, making maintainance super easy. You can sort them by author, title, or publication year, and adding new methods of sorting is a breeze. I kept my rather arbitrary categorization into science fiction, other fiction, and non-fiction (I culled manga since I don't read it any more). It's convenient, but I might change it in the future. Who knows, maybe my reading habits will eventually cover more branches of literature?

The books I've read since last time are Halo: The Flood, Asimov Laughs Again, The Life & Fables of Aesop, The Truth About Chuck Norris, The Portable Atheist, and 50 Short Science Fiction Tales. That last book is a compilation of SF short-short stories and I transcribed the ones I thought were awesome and put them on the shiny new Short Stories page. I have a few more I want to transcribe, so if you like the ones that are there, watch the page. I also added three new essays, "SF Words and Prototype Worlds" by Eric S. Raymond, "Thoughts of God" by Mark Twain, "Gaps in the Mind" by Richard Dawkins, and "Why We Need Academic Freedom to Question Newtonism" by PZ Myers. Speaking of Myers, he is funny, thoughtful, and hilariously entertaining, so I linked to his Pharyngula.

I've sunk a lot of my free time lately into playing the various Ninja Gaiden games. The payoff? Not much: Ninja Gaiden Miscellanea, which should only be interesting to you if you're as obsessed with Ninja Gaiden as I am (Ninja Gaiden II can't get here fast enough).

I added a new section to the Links page, Gaming encyclopedias, and shuffled things around a little bit. I've also read a couple of books, but I'll wait with those until I've fixed the sorry state of my Books page. (The pieces of data on that page are ordered exactly as typed. That's right, no database. The manual nature of it makes me cry.)

I've linked to lots of things.

For essays, there's "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" by Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Philosophy of science 101" (PDF) by Massimo Pigliucci, and "The Awful German Language" by Mark Twain. I love how many essays are just delicious little nuggets of enlightenment.

For the Links page, there's Point of Inquiry, Rationally Speaking, and AskGLaDOS.

As for Books there's only Kjetterbibelen which I bought on a whim and which turned out to be merely OK. I'll try to read more books. (I've been really bad at that lately, in favor of articles, essays, and podcasts, most of which doesn't even make it on my site.)

With that out of the way, I should really be more of a producer of information instead of a consumer. I'm sorry, but the world is just so darned interesting and most of the time I just want to gaze and marvel, with my drooling tounge on the floor, at the stupendous awesomeness of everything. Yes, this is a poor excuse.

"Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future's endless stair:
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us,
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where."

Happy birthday, Darwin.

I fixed two egregious mistakes that have been lurking in my archived news' navigation for too long (it would link to non-existent posts from 1969) and I cleaned it up a bit and made it more navigable while I was at it.