Beethoven's Symphonies

There have been a few things leading me to think about Beethoven's symphonies over the last few weeks. There was a CBC radio show on a weekend morning a few weeks ago in which there was a Beethoven expert being interviewed. He discussed the symphonies and it is interesting to remember that, although they are standard fare these days, they were very innovative when they were written - especially the 9th with the choral component in the last movement. I also forget how much they were rearranged in the years after they were first written - they seem liked fixed works to me now. However, the commentator did mention how different productions can really change the piece. I am not so into classical music that I would buy different productions of the same piece and appreciate the difference. So I loaded up my phone with the nine symphonies and began listening to them again. I have to say that I have purchased in total about nine Beethoven symphonies in different archaic formats in my life, but have never legitimately owned all nine at the same time. The ones I know the best are 1, 5, 6 (the pastoral, I had to look up the number) and 9 since I had those in my limited vinyl collection as a teenager. I am listening to the first as I write this, and they are playing on my morning alarm. For various reasons, getting up is hard these days, so I get a long dose as I try to wake up. Coincidentally, as I was getting interested in Beethoven again, I started watching the anime, Psycho Pass, which I can recommend. It is a sci-fi crime drama with social commentary and is quite thoughtfully done. The villains quote philosophers... and listen to Beethoven in the background. I thought it was the pastoral, but the forum posts say it the the 9th. I guess I don't know my Beethoven as well as I thought. Anyway, as good as Beethoven is... he is no Bach. My father agrees.

Card Wars

I am playing a new iOS game on my phone on the bus back and forth to work (I mostly cycle one way and bus the other on a given day - I have a large office in an old building with room to leave my bike). The game is Card Wars, based on a hilarious episode of the cartoon, Adventure Time. One of my Magic playing friends played it for us (it is episode #92) and is a mockery of more advanced Magic play. Well worth watching. So the iOS game is an electronic take on that game and is quite fun but with some flaws. If you know the game, I am coming up to quest #60 and am mostly playing with Princess Bubblegum as a hero and I went with Sandy Lands because of the Beach Mum card, readily available near the beginning of the game and I believe the strongest rank 2 creature (strong defence, decent attack, good activated ability):

It is a fun game, but the flaws are becoming apparent. To advance you either have to try for cards in a random chest that costs actual money or collect weaker cards by repeating early quests that you can combine to more powerful cards. But... to collect enough cards to do this you have to buy more card space. The blatant cash grab aspect of this is distasteful. In addition, there is no way to just get the cards you want, they all come out at random and no way to trade online. So, I will play for a while longer but the end is in sight. There is a physical card game you can get as well, with quite different rules. I have a set of decks, still looking for a buddy to play with. If only my friend Richard in England would come back to Vancouver...

Mr. Gigante

I was born in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada and my first memories are of North Vancouver in the Capilano area. I did my first years of Elementary School in Berkeley, California. I was there because my mother had gone to UC Berkeley to get a PhD in Resource Economics after my parents had separated. This was 1969-1972 so an interesting time to be in Berkeley. My mother was tear-gassed going between classes on one occasion. BART was just holes under construction. We lived in the UC Berkeley university village housing in Albany. I went to Cornell school. I had heard that it had been closed down because it was on the San Andreas fault but a younger colleague of mine said he went there (small world). Perhaps after seismic upgrading it was re-opened or maybe I have my stories wrong.

When I was in grade 2 (70-71), a small group of us were taken out of the classroom once a week for math enrichment. The group was me, Utz McKnight (who is now a political science professor at the University of Alabama and I keep meaning to try and get in contact with), and Alan whose last name I don't remember so can't look up. It should be said I only remember Utz' last name because our mothers were friends and they kept in touch for a while. Alan was a very cool kid I remember. Anyway, Mr. Gigante (and I am guessing at the spelling) came in and did cool math games with us once a week. I don't remember any specific details but this may be why I ended up as a mathematician in the end. I would look him up except that I don't know if this is the actual spelling of his name or what his first name is (unless it is Mister).

In the Spring of 2005 I gave a series of workshops to a small group of grade 5 students at Queen Victoria Annex School in Vancouver, where my children were students. They were targeted at motivated, bright but not necessarily "gifted" students. I guess this was motivated by Mr. Gigante and my own love of mathematics that he helped to inspire. I attach a link to the problems I got the students to look at:

http://www.math.ubc.ca/~wetton/workshops.html

Gai-Lan is the most perfect vegetable

There are standard European vegetables that I grew up with (carrots, spinach, celery, beans, lettuce, cucumber...) and the North American natives of potatoes and tomatoes. When I say European, I guess I mean Northern Europe (I am of mostly UK heritage with one Finnish grandmother). Beauties like Rapini which is well known in Southern Europe I didn't try until adulthood. We found it first in Toronto living near College and Dufferin (originally a Portuguese-Canadian neighbourhood). Rapini is a cross between broccoli and spinach, slightly bitter. Something quite similar, not quite so bitter, is an Asian vegetable, gai-lan. This is a fantastic vegetable to cook with. Great taste and very versatile. I made two of three stir fry dishes tonight for the family for dinner with it: it is widely available in Vancouver. Try it out! I am honestly not receiving any endorsements from local gai-lan growers. Let me end with a picture of my old steel wok. My wife bought this for me when we were students in New York City. I enjoy stir-frying, but have not had any real training in it and it is not my family heritage. I can say that it just doesn't work that well on an electric stove. I miss cooking with gas.

Wakfu

My tastes run to the geek side. While many of my mathematical colleagues are chess masters or world ranked scrabble players, my hobbies tend to fantasy and super-hero role playing (like Dungeons and Dragons but the Heroes system is better); comic books (I could say graphic novels); magic the gathering (for conservative friends, I say I am going to play cards with my friends - they might imagine it is poker); computer games. In the relatively short history of computer games, the (massively) multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPG) are relatively recent. I believe the first was Ultima Online. As it was described to me, it had massive playability flaws so I am glad I did not start with that one. My first MMORPG was Asheron's Call made by Turbine which debuted in 2004 and is still live. It has a great community and honestly I would be playing it still if I had a PC and the stones to sort out the details of the ancient connection protocols and how they would get through my router at home. The graphics are dated but the gameplay is thoughtful and fun and there are still monthly content updates. I went on to the industry standard, World of Warcraft (WoW). There is nothing bad to say about this game. It was well conceived with great gameplay for a diverse player base and looks fantastic. OK, I can say one bad thing about it: the stories and player community just don't match up to Asheron's Call, although many of the best ideas were taken from AC (the insect infestation in Silithus must have been inspired by the Olthoi of AC). I'll forget about WoW someday but I still have a map of Dereth on my wall at home. Oh, oh, I remember one of the great things for AC was the fan web site of Maggie the JackCat for the game. I briefly played Dungeons and Dragons Online (another Turbine offering) which was fun in a nostalgic way; also Guild Wars which had some innovative ideas: but I never found a community in either of these games. 

These are supposed to be short posts (one paragraph) but I guess it is OK to make an exception for the first one. Another game I devoted a couple of months to was Wakfu. Overall this was a low quality game and I can't recommend it to anyone. The game system was broken (you could defeat larger groups of higher level mobs but get less experience) and all servers allowed player versus player (PvP) without consent. However, there were just a couple of things about this game I thought were interesting. Combat was turn based! After initiating combat your character was moved to a grid and combat occurred by turns with lots of time for strategic decisions. This really worked for me. There was a great "housing" system: you had a TARDIS-like (if I have to explain TARDIS to you why are you reading this?) bag that you could flop down and enter your extra-dimensional housing hole. I really liked this. My main character was an Iop, a melee focussed character (picture below). I can say I never understood from the game whether Iop was a class or a race. As you advanced in the game you could pick skills from a skill tree (I honesty forget all the details except what follows). I took a set of skills where as you engaged in combat you built up power which you could then release in a burst, doing higher damage. What I remember best of the game is that as this power built up, my character would cackle with increasingly frenetic glee. I picked the picture below of the many images online because you can imagine the cackle looking at it. Again, I can't recommend the game but that gleeful cackle was pretty endearing. I understand that a French cartoon series was inspired (or inspired or was co-marketed) by the game and it is now available on Netflix. I don't imagine that it will be a quality show, but I will check it out. 

Companion Blog

I have started a new, companion blog, "Brian Wetton's Short, Daily RL", where (not surprisingly) I hope to make daily, short posts. For various reasons I am in my own head a little too much these days and I am hoping it will be useful to help me get some things out of it. I also imagine that one day I will be a novel writer, following in my father's footsteps. My daughter, who has actually some talent and training in creative writing, says that the best way to improve your writing is just to work at it every day. So, expect the same quality (or lack thereof) in my new blog, just shorter... and daily.

Donations

Our family makes some ongoing donations to some serious causes: Doctors without Borders (MSF), World Vision (sponsoring a child in the third world), and Women Against Violence Against Women (local Vancouver). From what we hear, these are organizations that deserve to be supported. Our family has a comfortable life, it is great that we are able to contribute to others, locally and globally.

This evening, I made a number of small donations to support freeware and free podcasts. The amount of excellent entertainment developed and put online "for free" these days is amazing. The products are freely available but you can voluntarily support them if you choose to, with whatever amount you wish. What amazes me is that people really do pay money, even when they don't have to. Somehow this is a movement and an attitude fundamentally different to standard capitalism. It makes me happy that people will voluntarily step up and pay for something that others can enjoy for free. The world will be filled with things that appeal to selfless people.

So most of the things fall in the geek category, as you can see:

• Wikipedia: Everyone knows this. I find all kinds of useful things here: from Gaussian Quadrature to X-men crossover story details. The science information I find has always been quite accurate. Pop culture information is very detailed. I am amazed at the quality of a resource which anyone can contribute to. Presumably the information on politics and religion can be more biased, although I have never seen anything egregious. I wonder how they manage competing views on a topic. 
• Rachel and Miles X-plain the X-men podcast: The X-men is a long running comic series (well, several series with common characters) that began in 1963. It is a Marvel product, which means that it has a single continuity (well, except for changes due to time travel) for the fifty years of its run (well, there were a few early years when it was on hiatus). Rachel and Miles have a weekly podcast that is slowly working its way through the long history of the series, "X-plaining" some of the weirder plot twists and continuity revisions. Very entertaining. 
• Welcome to Night Vale podcast: It is hard to describe this bi-weekly podcast in a way that will show why it is so entertaining. It is a radio show from a fictitious desert town full of "strange happenings". Imagine H.P. Lovecraft stories been told as news by a mellow radio show host. 
• Simple Comic: This is a freeware comic reader for mac. Displays scanned on e-comics in .cbr and .cbz. There is a version for iPhone, so I can read comics on the bus...
• Thermal Expansion and Minefactory Reloaded: These are two excellent minecraft (a sandbox adventure and building game) mods (programs that modify the original game). Thermal Expansion adds engines, processing machines and automated item and energy transport. There are several other mods that aim to add similar content, but Thermal Expansion is very elegant and gives such great control over functionality. The blocks from this mod are just so nice to work with. Minefactory Reloaded provides a whole array of machines to automate repetitive tasks in the game (planting and harvesting, monster creation and killing for items, animal breeding, enchanting and disenchanting...). Again, there are mods that have some of these functions, but Minefactory just does it more elegantly. Both mods are now grouped together in a common site. I expect great things from the synergy.
• Twilight Forest: This is another minecraft mod. This one adds a whole new world to the game (well, the Twilight Forest). You make a 2 by 2 pool of water, surround it with flowers and throw in a diamond to make the portal. The world is filled with new creatures, structures, treasures and bosses. It is a very fun, fantasy themed addition. 
• Chisel: Another minecraft mod. This is a very simple one, that allows you to "chisel" blocks into new, decorative patterns. It is useable early game on basic blocks and adds a lot of visual interest.