Beth and I went to visit my grandmother for a couple of days between Christmas and New Year, which was nice. It also gave me an opportunity to get a peek of how the resident at her retirement home a few doors down had decorated for the holidays. This was chiefly interesting because Josh and I had been rather impressed by the tackiness and kitschiness of her display when we were there at Thanksgiving. So I had high hopes for Christmas. And my oh my, I was not let down. However, in obtaining these photographs, I did very nearly embarass myself (and by extension possibly my grandmother) mortally, as the woman came home as I was walking away from having been taking the pictures. Now given that the last pictures I was taking were just of the little green reindeer, I feel that I could just have made some witty quip about wanting to take a picture of the adorable and cute little green reindeer and everything would have been alright. But instead I was flustered, and I said nothing at all, and now I feel rather awkward. Oh well.
Archive for December, 2006
American Gods
Posted by Dan Hertz on December 25, 2006
Well, with everything that’s been going on of Christmas type stuff, I don’t know if this was really the appropriate time to read American Gods by Neil Gaiman, but since I’m feeling guilty about not having read the books that Jess lent me, I decided to read it on this vacation.
My overall impression was that I really liked it. I think I need to read it again when I’m focusing less on trying to get through it and not being quite as distracted by other things going on around me and just trying to get through it to see what happens next, so to speak. And the other thing that I really feel like is that I don’t know enough of other mythologies from around the world. I mean, I feel okay about the Egyptian and Norse ones, but when you get to Eastern European ones and things like that I start to feel rather ignorant. And I feel like I would have enjoyed the book more if I’d understood more of those things. Or maybe not. I don’t know. But I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t been rushing through it trying to find out what was going to happen next. But that’s what you get for being impatient.
The only other Neil Gaiman stuff I’d read before was really his short stories in Smoke and Mirrors, which I liked a lot, although a great many of those were really disturbing. And then I’d read the Sandman graphic novels, which are also extremely good of course.
I’m not really sure whether I thought the book was satisfying or not, or whether I liked its idea of cosmology. It reminded me a fair bit of Mage: The Ascension, in some ways. I wonder if Neil Gaiman is a gamer at all.
Anyway, the other book of his that Jess has lent me is Neverwhere, which I’m going to read next, since I’ve also brought it along on this trip. Then when I get back perhaps I’ll read Coraline, or come back and re-read this and things will make more sense the second time through.
Posted in Books | 8 Comments »
Decorated Tree
Posted by Dan Hertz on December 24, 2006
This took a little bit longer than expected, but here are some pictures of the tree in its decorated state.
Posted in News Flash, Photos | 3 Comments »
The Enormous Tree
Posted by Dan Hertz on December 22, 2006
Well, this year I’m having Christmas with’s Beth’s family, and they happen to have a lot of room for a tree. So Beth had suggested that they try to get a large tree this year because I was going to be there and this year might be a good year to have a big tree since I would be around to help put it up and stuff and in order to impress me.
Posted in News Flash, Photos | 3 Comments »
Amber Characters
Posted by Dan Hertz on December 17, 2006
Well it’s that time again, when I have to find a compelling concept for a character for an Amber game. This time is even trickier because it’s for a PBEM (play by email) game, which I’ve never tried before, so I really don’t know what to expect from the game at all. In particular I don’t know to what extent it will just be a game about doing things and making plans and seeing whether things work out or not (which I feel like Amber can end up being more a game of, in any case), or how much it can really be a roleplaying experience.
I think this connects a bit with Jason’s blog entry about Roleplaying Games vs. Story Games. And of course it all plays into what sort of character to design since a lot will depend on what sort of game it’s going to be. And I’d really like to make sure my character concept matches the feel of the game well, obviously, particularly since this game may well be lasting a while and I’d rather not be switching characters partway through the game, like I had to in a couple of other of Jason’s games.
One problem I often tend to have is that my characters suffer from being one-trick ponies. This is because I come up with what I think of as a really cool gimmick or central idea for the character and base everything around that, their personality, powers, everything. And that is all well and good. It’s even possible to make characters that have a decent amount of depth to them, surprisingly enough. The problem that I’ve encountered in the past number of Amber games is that I’ve sort of had to re-make them on the fly in-game because the really cool concept or schtick that I came up with turned out to be pretty much utterly irrelevant as far as the game was concerned. So the plot hook that I thought I was providing was never relevant or useful at all.
So this time I was trying to move away from all that and instead ended up coming up with yet another gimmicky concept which may or may not work at all. I’m waiting to hear what Jason thinks of it.
More will follow if this does work, obviously, or if it doesn’t, since I’ll then have to think of something new.
Posted in Amber, Gaming | 10 Comments »
Time wasting
Posted by Dan Hertz on December 15, 2006
Recently, Maria posted an entry on her blog about suggestions for wasting time in a seasonally appropriate fashion. One of the links was for this fun little thing called LineRider.com, where you draw a course for this guy on a sled and he’ll then ride it. It happens that I had heard about this thing a few months ago via the livejournal of Aaron Williams, the author of the comics Nodwick and Full Frontal Nerdity, both available at www.nodwick.com.
This livejournal, which is also posted on that website, is the source of a number of good things, and I should really credit him for having brought them to my attention. I know that I learned of the Three In the Afternoon video from there, and I think also Chad Vader, although I may be wrong about the latter. In any case, when he posted a thing about this game, he also posted a neat link to this amazing course that someone had made. In order to really properly appreciate these two videos, I think you have to try messing around with the game for a few minutes and see how hard it is to actually make anything resembling a decent course. Then think about how much time it must have taken to construct these courses. I really have no idea who these people are or how they had the time to make these things but I am in awe of them. Special credit also goes to the first of these two clips for using music from Cowboy Bebop (even if it is a remixed version) 
Posted in Fun, Links | 3 Comments »
Done with teaching
Posted by Dan Hertz on December 12, 2006
Well I’ve just finished grading the final for the class I’ve been a lab TA for, so this officially finishes my responsibilities for that class. I had to do some lab makeups this weekend, which were less than entirely fun, but at least now it’s all over and on the whole I don’t really think I’m in a position to complain much about it.
I still haven’t really decided whether I’m going to do it again next semester, in part because I’m going to be doing some more conferences and things which might make it a little more difficult, but also just because I want to be able to focus more on my thesis and stuff and even though it doesn’t really take very much time away from that, it might be a little distracting to be teaching lab every now and then. I guess it’s something I’ll have to think about and decide over the ‘break’, as my undergraduate friends are calling it. I can’t really say that I’m going to be having too much of a break, since I’m currently at a pretty critical stage in my thesis research and thus need to be getting a lot of work done. Any time I’m not actually working on making plots and things, I should probably be working on putting together a draft of an outline for the paper, or at least something resembling that. Or else I should be thinking about beginning to write my thesis.
Oh, and while I can’t yet really show any plots with numbers on them, I do think it’s safe to show this thing, showing overlayed data and monte carlo. The different colors represent different types of background that I expect to contribute, along with the signal (in red). The background that one person expected would make my analysis impossible is the light brown. See if you can spot it in the signal region, which is essentially just the bin that has the peak of the signal in it It was very satisfying to show these plots and demonstrate that I was able to completely eliminate those backgrounds.
When I reconstruct the event, I have a candidate muon and a neutrino, which I reconstruct by finding what is not there, and knowing the total energy and momentum of what should be there. The plot shows the total energy of the neutrino and the muon (which is equal to the energy of the D meson they are the decay products of) minus the energy of the incoming beam (which the D meson must have an energy equal to). The signal will peak very strongly at zero and the backgrounds will not.
The extremely good agreement between data and Monte Carlo is very encouraging because it means that we’re modeling things very well and understand what’s going on extremely well. Basically, things are going well and a result shouldn’t be too far off. Now I just have to figure out what all the systematic uncertainties on this are. Which will take quite a long time, of course…
Posted in Academics, Thesis | 2 Comments »
Tetanus shots and blogging
Posted by Dan Hertz on December 8, 2006
So, as I posted not to long ago in my entry on blog fame, a reasonable amount of the traffic generated on this blog is due to the post about my tetanus shot from back in August. That post generated a fair number of comments before I stopped allowing further comments. And so while there have been lots of people reading that post, I hadn’t had any new comments, obviously. But today that changed. My most recent entry received a comment for moderation which read thus:
Dan, you put poisons into your body, you’re going to feel bad. It’s common sense. This is referring to your locked tetanus vaccination rant about being sick for 2 days after receiving the injection. You posted on it, not us. Why would you have a _public_ blog if you do not want people responding to it? I can tell that from both the locking reaction to your very own public story and then wondering why you feel like you have flu-like symptoms after you let some quack poke you with a serum that is comprised of mercury, aluminum and formaldehyde (all which are toxic); You’ve got to be a moron. Just wanted to enlighten you. The aluminum is still probably in your system too; As it tends to bioaccumulate.
Formaldehyde is also a known potent carcinogen and is quite toxic to humans. Lastly, mercury causes liver and kidney damage and neurological problems and also tends to bioaccumulate. Alzheimer’s, cancer and/or Mad Hatter Syndrome anyone?
–malign
Now I didn’t really want to allow this comment since it was posted as a comment to a completely unrelated blog post and I didn’t particularly want people to start flooding random entries on my blog with comments relating to my tetanus shot. But I also felt like I had to put it somewhere. Because it’s so… eloquent and stuff. Like, wow. I’m a moron? Because I had a tetanus shot? Fascinating.
There’s a new bar set for the level of crazy in comments to my blog, clearly.
For the record, I think that vaccinations are a good thing. Tetanus is quite dangerous and there is every reason in the world to vaccinate against it. Although it was unpleasant that I had that reaction to the shot that I did, I am certainly not unhappy that they vaccinated me. It sure beats getting lock-jaw. And yes, I’m also in favor of vaccinating children in general with things like MMR vaccines and is like. I think that parents who choose to have their children not vaccinated are irresponsible and doing a disservice to society.
On the question of why I have this blog, if not to allow for public debate… Well it’s so that I can amuse myself and my friends, keep them up to date on the goings on in my life, muse about Amber games I’m currently playing in, think about games I’d like to play, link to cool websites, rant about the state of the world and/or the country, and so on.
And I guess the topics which I’m more interested in debating are ones relating to gaming theory and roleplaying and such things. Or pros and cons of operating systems and computers and other dorky things like that. Ideological rants about why I’m an idiot because I allowed myself to be vaccinated… really not so much something I was counting on cropping up.
Posted in Blogging | 4 Comments »
Another presentation/talk panic
Posted by Dan Hertz on December 5, 2006
This Friday and Saturday mark another collaboration meeting, which means that I have to (or get to, depending on how you look at it) another talk on the state of my research. Actually, things have been moving forwards quite well recently, which is good. I should be able to address most of the problems that people asked me about at the last meeting and tell them why they won’t actually be problems in the way that they had thought. And it also turns out that my result is going to turn out to be a good deal better than I had been thinking it would be.
All in all, things are looking quite good, but I do still need to get some more things done, make some more plots, and write my talk, of course. So that’s my current major occupation, basically. But this morning I actually looked at data for the first time, and it all looks really good!
I’ll put up a pretty plot later when I’ve got one superimposing data and monte carlo, showing the magnificent agreement.
Posted in Academics, Thesis | 2 Comments »
