I can't resist dragging a bit of math/computer/internet coolness onto this site. It's pretty geeky, but this is something that I know many regular readers will appreciate.

Yesterday, I was introduced to a tool called jsMath. It lets you easily insert formatted mathematical notation into web pages.

Now, I know what you're thinking. You're either thinking "This is going to be just like latex2html, and the quality of that sucks." Or you may be thinking "Great -- another MathML, which requires a special plugin, isn't well-supported yet, and is a new language that's hard to learn." Wrong, and wrong^*. jsMath lets you write LaTeX math directly in your HTML code. At the end of your file you call a Javascript function. The function makes a pass over the file and converts all the LaTeX in place into math that's formatted using HTML. It uses LaTeX fonts if they're installed. Otherwise it falls back on Unicode fonts or images. So the client loads the page, and their browser methodically converts mysterious TeX symbols into beautiful math notation.

The thing I like about this approach, the thing that makes it truly psychotic, is that from what I can tell, the author simply re-implemented TeX in Javascript. Now that's dedication and High Hackery. Goodness 10000.

^*Nath points out that you may also be thinking "What the hell is he talking about? I'm going to do something else." That's prefectly reasonable. Have a nice day.

We were shopping in the local independent bookstore this afternoon, and there it was, on a shelf of recent arrivals. The new Calvin and Hobbes collection. A huge box set containing everything Watterson ever published, in three glorious volumes. I don't think it's supposed to be available yet, but the guy at the store said it was for sale. He even opened the store copy, saying that he was curious to take a look at it too. Of course, I wasn't about to drop two hundred dollars (plus tax) on the spot. That would probably be the most expensive book I've ever bought, and I have bought some expensive books in the past. But it will be mine. Oh, yes. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. In fact, probably not every day next week. But soon.

The C+H collection sat right next to the recent complete Far Side collection. I'm very interested in that one too. Fortunately, my mom told me that they had received a copy somehow and didn't want it. So I expect I'll be picking that up at some point in the future (I would say "hint, hint" here, but I'm sure shipping costs would be ridiculous. I'll just wait until I can get it from them in person).

My little girl turned three today. Blow me down! She's totally like a little kid, all cute and excitable and funny. But she's freakin' three. I'll never get over it.

I need hardly say, especially to those of you who were kind enough to send birthday wishes, that today is also International Talk Like a Pirate Day (Eric takes the booty for calling my daughter a "Saucy Barnacle"). I'm so proud of my little pirate girl. We have taught her to say "Arrrr, Matey" and, to a lesser extent, "Avast, ye scurvy dogs". I also attended a master's thesis presentation, a PhD defense, and an invited talk today, and interjected or experienced varying degrees of pirate talk. The invited speaker definitely pirated up his presentation a little bit, though he noted that giving an entire technical talk in Pirate would be as difficult as giving it in any other foreign language. He stuck to English, but did make sure to have one object in the talk named R.

In completely unrelated news, my CD-ROM drive just spat out a Tori Amos bootleg called "Me and a Piano". This event is notable because it's the very last CD that was left to rip in my primary mainstream and soundtrack collections. All that's left now are the classical, world music, comedy and spoken word collections (maybe another hundred CDs or so in all). Then I'll be done. For the record, I'm up to about 400 CDs and 5000 songs, though those measurements are bound to be inaccurate for several reasons.

In June, I mentioned while talking about the ferocious heat that my shower had stopped working. Truthfully, it had never worked correctly. From the day we moved in, we couldn't figure out how to use the fixture in the shower to adjust the temperature. Eventually, we decided that the fixture was simply broken, and not based on mechanical principles beyond our ken. That was fine, because although the shower was stuck on hot, it was a tolerable hot -- at the high end of what I consider acceptable for a shower, and probably just right for Nath.

However, the temperature in the shower seemed to climb slowly as time wore on. It was as if we were getting less and less cold water mixed in with the hot. Finally, we had a plumber in to take a look at the shower and see what he could do. He scraped away all the built-up rust and blockages. He left us with a shower that was completely unusable -- we now had a high-pressure jet of scalding hot water instead of a mere trickle.

But I'm happy to report that as of two weeks ago, we have a working shower. The plumber returned and put in a proper fixture. Of course, he had to rip a hole in the shower to do it, and patched the hole with tiles that don't match, but for us it was salvation. Ah, the bliss of being able to choose. A hot shower? A cold shower? Perhaps a warm shower? All of these, and more, are now at my fingertips.

I have finally gotten around to reorganizing the source code that runs Thingo (about 1500 lines of Python, to be exact). The most important change is that I moved all the infrastructure, including the scripts to manage the database and the database file itself, out of the public web directory. It was utterly idiotic to have left that stuff out in the open for so long, and I've accumulated enough experience to handle this sort of website much more ably now.

My plan was to use this as an opportunity to review the source code and fix all the terrible warts. I remember the code as being a complete hack that I threw together and left to fester as soon as it showed signs of life. Surprisingly, after reviewing the code, I can say that it holds up rather well. I wasn't even close to the level of revulsion that would have compelled me to rewrite it. There are still some warts, but nothing that's going to prevent the site from working just fine for a long, long time.

Now that the files are moved around, I may try a couple of experiments. I really need to improve the formatting (yes, I'm years behind on the inevitable tables-to-CSS transition). And for a long time I've wanted to add a search feature, mostly so that I can link back to relevant articles from the past.

To the outside web or rss visitor, the entire site should currently function exactly as it always has. But if you're noodling around and discover something that doesn't seem to be working correctly, please contact me so that I can get to work on it.

If you've spent any time with me over the past two weeks, you know that I've been on a diet. That diet ends in about two hours, at which point I'll indulge in a couple of bites of some yummy chocolates I bought for Nath yesterday. I've never been on a diet of any kind before, and it was an interesting experience.

This diet was an herbal detoxification kit I picked up at a local organic food store. The kit contains four bottles of herbal supplements (three in pill form, one liquid) and a small brochure that describes the nutrition plan. The combination of proper nutrition and supplements is supposed to rid your body of the toxins that accumulate in obvious places: the liver, the kidneys, the lymphatic system, and the digestive system. Every day before breakfast and dinner, you take six pills and 30 drops of the liquid, for a grand total of 144 pills and 720 drops.

So, do I feel pure? Do I feel cleansed? I dunno. I certainly feel well. I'm not glowing or anything. I don't think my chakras are all open. But sure, I'm fine, thank you. I guess I noticed some changes in my pattern of... er... elimination, but nothing major. I can at least say that the supplements did something. The brochure warns that you might get strange symptoms or feel like crap in the first few days as your body begins to flush out toxins. That never really happened, though I had a mild headache one night. Does that mean that I've been eating right all this time, and had few accumulated toxins? Again, I dunno.

The nutrition part was much more interesting to me. From the point of view of what I usually eat, this diet was very restrictive. No dairy (except for butter, which for some reason was alright). No wheat or processed flours. No sugar of any kind (including maple syrup, honey, molasses, and so on -- no cheating!). No processed foods. No juices. No fermented food (soy sauce, vinegar, alcohol, black tea). A balance of about 20% acidic proteins (meat, fish, eggs, legumes) to 80% alkaline and neutral foods (fruits and vegetables, brown rice, a few other whole grains).

The hardest part was adjusting to the set of foods I was allowed to eat. That's a logistical problem more than anything else. I certainly like the foods permitted by the diet; the trick was getting them all and finding ways to cook with them (and without things like vinegar that are so important in flavouring). Turns out that what my student's husband calls a "2-6-10" meal -- starch at ten o'clock on the plate, steamed vegetable at two, and hunk of meat at six -- works pretty well here. We had lots of corn on the cob, beets, potatoes, green and wax beans, and especially sweet potatoes. Big salads with oil and lemon juice, boiled egg, and sunflower seeds. Oatmeal with fresh fruit (but no milk) for breakfast. Berries for snacks and dessert. I got a lot of mileage out of the veggie chili recipe from The New Basics and my mom's recently forwarded rice and lentils recipe.

The other logistical issue was that I had to bring lunch to work with me every day. Of course, I ought to do that anyway, and in the end the extra cost of buying huge piles of fresh ingredients was probably offset by effectively spending no money during working hours for two weeks.

I was dreading the common complaints about diets: the uncontrollable cravings and the constant hunger. I never had cravings. I would happily sit among the members of my lab as they ate junk food and not feel the need to grab some for myself. Of course, we have an ice cream maker in the lab and my colleague makes fresh ice cream once a week. It was a shame to miss that. My student brought me an ice cube in a parfait glass as a sugar-free, dairy-free alternative. But the presence of junk food didn't tempt me to cheat. It felt a bit like giving up cable TV. I watched it for hours every day, but never missed it once it was gone. The closest I came to cheating was adding a tablespoon of lemon juice to my water for flavour.

As for hunger, I was pigging out. My lunches were positively enormous. The nutritional guide specifies proportions, not absolute amounts. Hunger wasn't really an issue. So what's really interesting is that despite the fact that I was eating even more than normal, I still lost 10-15 pounds in the last two weeks. I don't know exactly how much, because this isn't a weight loss diet. I haven't been keeping careful track.

Overall, I guess I'm a little smaller, a little wiser, and a lot more pure. I may use this exercise as a basis for longer-term dietary changes. After all, wheat, sugar and dairy are never really very good for you. After my small chocolate indulgence at midnight, I will be breaking the non-fast tomorrow morning with a feast of dim sum (which, interestingly, still keeps me away from wheat and dairy). I'm hoping that the return of these tastes to my palate will make them much more intense, so that I will taste sticky rice as never before.

I've had some good feedback about my previous post. A few came in via email, and more in person, particularly from melted_snowball. He said that he finds it odd that I don't allow comments. Well, it's a thought. But rather than re-implement Thingo today to add comments, I'll take his advice and put up a dummy entry on LiveJournal for discussion. I can continue this service as needed. If you have a pressing need to add a comment to a post of mine, email me and I'll create another post like this one.

So. Feel free to discuss the hurricane and the disaster that began afterwards.

Comment on "Let's talk about the weather"

For a few days now, Nath has had no choice but to endure the full force of my category 5 ranting. But I fear the levees are breaking, and the rants are threatening to spill over onto this site. It has been over a month since my previous rant, so I hope everyone is feeling refreshed.

The hurricane was a terrible disaster, and it's getting worse. Apparently, there are about fifty buses evacuating people from the Superdome to the Astrodome in Houston. Assume we can evacuate 2500 people at a time. It'll take about eight hours to get to Houston. There are tens of thousands of people in the dome; let's guess 25000. That's ten round trips, so the minimum total time for evacuation is 160 hours, or about a week. The last stragglers in the Superdome will have been there with no power or water and little food for over ten days. If they can hold out -- meanwhile, the crazies are lighting fires in the dome and shooting at rescue helicopters. I believe the evacuation has been called off until order is restored there. And the Superdome is the biggest, but certainly not the only place where people are waiting to be rescued.

Everyone's a little hesitant to drag politics into these events, or at least to do it so quickly. But it's starting to happen already (apparently this morning's New York Times has a good editorial). And I've been doing it too, to the point where I'm furious about it. I need to get down some of my thoughts here.

We've known since Saturday that this storm meant business. Nobody can predict how serious a hurricane will be, but we knew this one would be a major threat. In that sort of situation, you'd think the president would rush back to his command centre, ready to be a leader if his leadership were necessary. Indeed, media reports tend to lead by telling you that Bush cut his vacation short by two days to get back to Washington. Poor guy. This was a five-week vacation, one that gave Bush the record for the most vacation days taken by any president, ever. More importantly, what was he doing during those few days after the hurricane and before returning to the White House? It's no secret: he was golfing. He was celebrating John McCain's birthday. He was giving a speech about medicare in California. He was hamming it up with a country music star. Holding a guitar (many have made the excellent comparison to Nero). Does he have any concern for human life?

Bush said this morning that nobody had anticipated the levees breaking. That's crap. The city, the state, and FEMA all knew that New Orleans was at terrible risk. They had ongoing projects to repair and improve their systems for preventing damage, but the federal government had gutted the budgets for those projects in order to divert money to the war in Iraq and to homeland security. Homeland security? At an even higher level, Bush's anti-environment policies are helping make storms worse. I read an excellent editorial about the need to protect wetlands around New Orleans in order to lessen the effect of storm surges. "Repair the marshlands or rebuild New Orleans". That's from seven weeks ago.

A big chunk of the Louisiana national guard got sent to Iraq. Homeland security has refused to allow Vancouver's DART urban search-and-rescue team, one of the best trained in the world, into the US. And on and on. And Bush gets up and gives a flaccid, perfunctory speech telling the world that everyone will be OK. The best summary I've read of how Bush's bad decisions made this disaster worse than it might have been is this diary from dailyKos. I pull at my hair and grind my teeth every time I think that people voted for him. Well, they can celebrate with six dollar gallons of gasoline.

Nath gets annoyed by the fact that I spend so much time obsessing over US politics. Well, first of all, Katrina is the big news story in the Canadian media too -- frankly, not much is going on in Canada right now. But the bigger problem is that Bush's bad decisions affect everyone in the world. If I didn't think Canadians would be affected, I wouldn't care as much. But Canadians are affected. Bush refuses to clean up the environment, and my city has one of the lowest air quality ratings in Canada because of American air pollution. You know, just as an example.

You read this far? This was mostly me venting a lot of accumulated anger. I hope the situation isn't as bad as it seems from over here, but I'm not optimistic. I'm certainly pessimistic about the capacity of US leaders to manage this disaster short term, and the environmental and energy crisis long term. Wait, I've got it -- they'll add a couple of additional months to daylight savings time. That ought to do it.