out of the blue

If anyone doesn't have photoshop or the Gimp, or doesn't want to bother opening them up (because they take up so much system resources), and doesn't use IE….

I programmed some JavaScript color selectors. One based on the Red-Green-Blue channel model, which will help you understand how web colors work if you play around with it, and another based on the Hue-Saturation-Value model, which is much more intuitive.

Works in Firefox, Opera, Shiira and Safari; doesn't work in IE. If you test it in other browsers, go ahead and let me know.

[ rgb ] [ hsv ]

Okay, those of you who have read the Scarlet Letter need to, without looking it up, tell me which of these spellings is correct. Don't look at other people's answers, just say what seems right to you. I'm curious.

1. Roger Chillingsworth
2. Roger Chillingworth

I spelled it incorrectly throughout the entirety of my essay that I just turned in, which is rather embarrassing considering how much pride I take in my ability to spell. I think I got the wrong one in my head in High School, and then never revised it even though I read the name hundreds of times. It's funny how you don't actually read long words, you just see the shape and move on. Optimization for reading, you know. And since I was reading fast, I had even less opportunity to catch my mistake.

Anyway, please comment, if you remember the story at all.

Stereotypically, it's the guy who doesn't remember when he first saw the girl; it's the guy who misplaces somewhere that golden feeling he had: she separates from the crowd, time lingers upon the moment, that first glance, and somehow she is special, he will remember her. Instead, it's Sarah who can't recall me from that first day of orientation at SST. We never shared any classes that first year, and I didn't talk to her again almost until summer, but somehow I remember that first meeting. Somehow, she stood out.

Early the next school year, we went on SST's annual beach trip, and for some reason I ended up hanging out with Sarah the whole time. Some crazy mutual thing, I guess. On the bus ride back, I sat in front of her and a large group of us played Apples to Apples. It was awkward holding hands across the seat with a teacher sitting next to her and everything, but who cared? We were intoxicated.

Throughout that year, Sarah and I spent tons of time together. Playing frisbee, talking online until the early hours of the morning, sitting beneath a waterfall near her house. She convinced me to skip class for the first time to go walk in the nature park. It was glorious and carefree.

Even though we pretty much revolved around each other that year, we never dated.

But things have changed now. Sarah and I have only gotten closer over the years, as we both grew older and (perhaps) more mature. We spent the summer playfully friendly, and when I went to visit Sarah last semester, I knew there was something there. Yet I still wasn't ready for a relationship. I felt there was still too much tangled up in my mind. It wasn't until this last break that I felt truly ready to date again.

Early on Christmas morning, we made it official.

So, she and I are an item now. A thing. Star-crossed lovers blinded by passion, or something like that. Our personalities complement each other as though such a thing were inevitable. I am more comfortable in this than I have ever been before. I haven't gotten everything sorted out in my mind, but for the first time I don't feel I need to; this is how things stand, and I am happy. Now I can write absurd love letters about the heat death of the universe. Now I can taste that bittersweet mixture of fondness and longing for an absent love. Now I can lay aside some of my past worries and simply take pleasure in life. Now I can without reservation tell someone I love them fully. And Sarah is the root of all these joys.

That's my personal entry. It has been sitting in my head for a long time. Now everyone knows my secret. Sarah, I love you.

Has it been too long since my last truly-insightful personal entry? Yes it has. Am I about to make one now? Yes I am. Frabjous day. (Isn't it interesting that I know how to spell nearly all words that I've encountered, including absolutely nonsensical ones? No, not really: I just remember them as sequences of sounds that are close but emphasize the spelling, and then while speaking I convert them into how they actually sound. (Actually, it probably has nothing to do with that at all, I just wanted to propose an interesting possibility that is not entirely grounded in reality. Or did that explaination come to me in a flash of brilliance, only to become unveiled as a falsehood as I finished writing it down? You may never know. ) )

…what's that? Where's that post? I said I'm about to make one now. That means that I may not be finished with it until tomorrow. Or the end of the weekend. But it's coming. You can feel it in the air.

Well, this is a day late (because the internet was absolutely not working last night), but that's okay. Happy birthday, dear sister. I hope you had a lovely day. And now you're old! Heh heh heh. Here's your birthday present:

This is a touching discovery of a pair of 3000-4000 year old skeletons eternally locked in a tender embrace. Ann writes well of it, so I'll pass you along to her.

It looks like the Bush administration has finally admitted that global warming might actually be a real problem:

In a grim and powerful assessment of the future of the planet, the leading international network of climate scientists has concluded for the first time that global warming is “unequivocal” and that human activity is the main driver, “very likely” causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950.

In its last report, in 2001, the panel, consisting of hundreds of scientists and reviewers, said the confidence level for its projections was “likely,” or 66 to 90 percent. That level has now been raised to “very likely,” better than 90 percent. Both reports are online at www.ipcc.ch.

….

The Bush administration, which until recently avoided directly accepting that humans were warming the planet in potentially harmful ways, embraced the findings, which had been approved by representatives from the United States and 112 other countries on Thursday night.

….

At the same time, Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman rejected the idea of unilateral limits on emissions. "We are a small contributor to the overall, when you look at the rest of the world, so it’s really got to be a global solution," he said.

The United States, with about 5 percent of the world’s population, contributes about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, more than any other country.

What astonishes me is how bloody long it took for them to accept that. Scientists have been getting surer and surer, and among most reputable scientists there has been a consensus for a few years now. But the attitude of the Bush administration has been "We have some scientists who doubt these theories, so we're not even going to consider them." It was easier to plug their ears and loudly hum than to actually pursue a legitimate investigation into the veracity of such theories.

Now that we're past that particular hurdle, now that it has become so overwhelmingly obvious that even they cannot ignore it, I wonder what they are going to do about it.

The following day, Charles Stross (a brilliant fellow by all accounts) posts an article noting that "The American Enterprise Institute, a think tank largely funded by Exxon-Mobil is offering to pay climatologists $10,000 for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." This will, of course, mortally wound those scientists' reputations. Stross notes that $10,000 isn't quite enough to forever put you out of a reputable job.

I'm a little confused about the tendency for nations to abhor unilateral restraints. It seems to me that they are an excellent way to gain the moral high ground (that America has entirely lost by now) and to actually push for true change. "See, we're doing it, now you should too." I understand that in this sort of game theory dilemma it is the ideal (purely profit-motivated) situation for everyone to limit their emissions except you, but it doesn't accomplish the goal: The goal isn't to "win" in some technical economic sense, but to keep intact the valuable resource we have in the natural world. It seems to me that the best way to do that is to simply start changing, and expect the rest of the world to follow in our footsteps. The reason the Kyoto Protocol largely failed is that the United States wouldn't accept such limits. The result? The world was set back a good ten or twenty years in that particular branch of environmental protection. Are such economic imbalances simply not feasible? Would it put our already shaky economy on even less stable grounds? I don't know. But I bet we could afford it if we really cared. Let's hope that the other 112 nations that approved the study will be willing to be reasonable about emissions and that change can be effected quickly. I wonder how likely that is….

If you make one, it is likely that someone else has made the same mistake, in a more important setting. Take, for example, a common search and replace in an html page. If you have a bunch of <div> tags, and you want to replace them with more semantically correct <p> tags, you might do a search and replace for "p" to replace "div". This would be a mistake if, say, your page was about a certain section of a hospital or about the earnings of your site or about a mathematical formula, resulting in these sorts of quotes:

• "Retained earnings are profits reinvested in the business rather than paid out as pidends."
• "Dr. Sugarbaker is Chief of the pision of Thoracic Surgery at Brigham & Women's Hospital."
• "As a guide, spa capacity in litres pided by daily bathers pided by 12 is a good formula."
• "…pergence or Convergence in the Light of Europeanization"
• "A 401(k) can persify its investments and offer participants a variety of choices, including company stock."
• "One of the most interesting things about the World Wide Web is its persity in information."
• "Bill Clinton stated that Republicans were piders and not a uniting party…"
• "Crazed or pinely inspired, the 17-year-old peasant girl presented herself to the Dauphin…"
• "…to watching my mom raise two young children as a porced parent in the 1970s…"

Unfortunately, too many people misspell Persian and purge; pest, pine, pining, and ping are all fairly common words; Pisor is a name; other words, like divulged, aren't common enough that the possibility missed them. But there are plenty of possiblities, just in the <div> != <p> error. You would expect that republicans are spiders, but it's more obscure than that. I really wonder what a persity is.

Can you find any more?

A few nights ago I had a dream. It was the most internally-consistent and plot-driven dream I have ever had, as far as I can remember. An excerpt:

A few friends and I were standing in a dark forest. Above us, silhouetted against a twilit cliff face was a large puma. It turned towards us and began to walk down the slope in our direction. We were, needless to say, a wee bit frightened. Then, about halfway to us, it veered off into a small hollow and laid down, pulling up the covers around itself and going to sleep. We took this at face value and continued talking until it asked us if we could please be a little quieter:, because it was trying to sleep.

It was a rather mystical dream, filled with more familiar faces than most of mine are. I appreciated that.