There are so far exactly two songs from the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack that have grabbed my attention. They are The Shape of Things to Come by Bear McCreary and Metamorphosis One by Philip Glass. I want the piano sheet music to both of these!

The latter came up early in the second season, credited to Kara Thrace’s father, but was originally from Glass’s 1989 album “Solo Piano”. That means the sheet music is at my grasp, all I have to do is pay for it.

The former is decidedly more difficult. Even if a piano arrangement of the first season of Battlestar Galactica was published, I could buy it just for this one song. The composer maintains a blog about the BSG soundtrack but I can’t very well write a comment saying “I really like this one song. You should put out a piano arrangement of it, but not any of the other songs because they all kinda suck.” Maybe I can convince a music student to transcribe it for me. Music students are good for that sort of thing.

Now, onto the second topic of the day, the BSG timeline. One outstanding question remains is the time that the series takes place. In the BSG universe the Earth is a colony of another planet, Kobol, where humans originated, but when that colonization happened, in either the BSG world or ours, is open to debate.

The timeline at the BSG wiki puts the colonization of Earth as far back as 4000 before the series takes place. Human civilization on Earth can be dated back as far as 10 000 years ago, but it didn’t really start to take off until about 8000 to 4000 years ago.

Here are some options:

• The dawn of human civilization on Earth and the arrival of settlers from Kobol is the same thing, and so must have happened much earlier than 2000 BC. This means, assuming the Galactica finds Earth at the end of this season as we all expect it will, in our timeline it has already arrived.
• The writers have taken more liberty with the Earth’s timeline than our history professors would like, so that humans arrived on Earth 4000 years ago and the fleet from the other Twelve Colonies will arrive in the present day.
• Kobol settlers arrived on Earth and mingled with the native human population. Depending on when they arrived, the series could be happening at almost any time.

There are other clues to work with.

• The Colonials worship, and have since their Kobol days, the good old fashioned Greek Gods. At first glance this could have just been a convenient way to give them a different religion—they may not actually be the same Greek gods, but they’re translated that way so that we can understand what they’re talking about in the same way that aliens in sci-fi shows always speak English, even when they explicitly don’t speak English. However, there’s more and more evidence these are the same gods. It has already turned out that our twelve signs of the zodiac are named after the Twelve Colonies and not the other way around. It might be that the Kobol settlers brought their religion with them and taught it to the Greeks. I don’t know when these Greek gods came up, but I could guess several thousand years ago. That could put the series in the present day.
• Technology is a problem. The Kobols arrived in spaceships 4000 years before the series and still had spaceships a thousand years later to go back to Kobol. One can imagine they lost their technology after arriving, but it’s slightly harder to believe that they hung onto it in good working order for a thousand years and then lost it. Why didn’t anybody, in those thousand years, make note of that spaceship parked in the back yard?
• The final four Cylons heard Bob Dylan music in their heads. Sure, Kara Thrace played a Philip Glass song, but in the BSG universe her father wrote it so it doesn’t give us a timeline. The Dylan song, though, wasn’t explained at all. We know now that the final five Cylons have been to Earth. They also said that hearing the song was like remembering something out of childhood, and hearing it made them realise that they were Cylons. It could be a very deliberate choice, then, to use a real song instead of just composing some crazy Cylon music, and this could be a firm clue as to when the series takes place (i.e., present day).
• Davis Quinton, on Corner Gas, thinks that we could all be descendants of the last surviving Battlestar. But presumably, this is based on the original series and not the new one. Too bad though, it would be a cool theory.

I’m currently torn between two theories. I think it would be cool to have it end up that BSG is taking place in the present day and that we are all descendants of the thirteenth tribe of Kobol. It’s probably the story that fits best with the timeline so far. On the other hand, I’m still betting that the Final Five Cylons are not Cylons at all but something similar that has not just visited Earth but actually originated here. That would mean the series takes place in the future, which might strain the timeline of the settlement of Earth in the first place. But maybe not—a couple hundred years in either direction never hurt anybody. (I’m also really hoping that contact between the Final Five and the Cylons we’re familiar with somehow precipitated the war. Maybe the Final Five were sent to re-establish contact with the Twelve Colonies and the Cylons didn’t take kindly to the idea.) But as far as the topic of this post, I just want to know how the timeline will resolve itself, whether the choice of using the Bob Dylan song means anything, and how to play The Shape of Things to Come on the piano.

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Addendum: Bear McCreary talks about the use of the Bob Dylan / Jimi Hendrix song here. Apparently the idea is that the song comes from a Colonial composer, and just happens to be the same as a song on Earth. I still think it’s a suspicious, though. But maybe, if both colonies can write the same song, both can invent the same Cylons, and therefore my theory is right. Woo me! (Just wait until the series finale when I’m proved utterly wrong…)

I just heard about this mysterious letter Fermilab received sometime last year via Cosmic Variance. Its author remains unknown although the two paragraphs of chicken-scratch have been decoded.

My mom’s a big fan of the Cryptoquip puzzle in the daily paper, which consists of a famous quotation encrypted with simple letter substitution. They give you one letter for free (e.g., X equals F) and you have to run with that and your knowledge of the English language to decipher the rest. My curiosity got the better of me and I looked up the solution without even trying it myself, but I printed the letter for her. She actually came pretty close to solving it. Unfortunately there’s an error (or is it?) in the first paragraph that makes solving it with brute force cryptoquip style difficult. It turns out to be much easier, as these things often do, if you just make a clever choice in your decryption scheme, which relies on things like having conveniently ordered the possible permutations correctly.

Because I had nothing else to do this weekend, I hacked together a simple program to encode and decode the two codes used in the Fermilab letter. It can be found here. An example of its output:

||| ||| | || ||| || ||| ||| ||| ||| || ||| | ||| ||| || ||| ||| || ||| | || ||| || ||| ||| ||| ||| || | | | ||| ||| ||| | | | || ||| | ||| ||| | || ||| ||| ||| | ||| ||| ||| ||| ||| || ||| || ||| || || | ||| ||| | | || | ||| || ||| ||| ||| | ||| ||| ||| ||| ||| | || | || ||| ||| | || ||| ||| ||| || ||| ||| | ||| ||| || | | ||| || || | ||| ||| ||| || | || | || ||| || | ||| | | ||| ||| | | ||| ||| ||| ||| || || ||| ||| | || | | ||| | || ||| ||| ||| ||| | ||| ||| ||| | | | ||| | | ||| ||| | || ||| | | ||| ||| ||| || ||| || ||| || || | ||| ||| || ||| | ||| ||| ||| | | || | || ||| | ||| ||| || ||| | ||| | || ||| ||| ||| || ||| || | || ||| | || |||

Go ahead and try to decode it. Extra points if you don’t use the cheat.

So now I’ve decided that trying to break codes is fun. I remember back in elementary school inventing an alphabet so I could write messages only me or a couple of my friends could read, which was really just designing a difficult to read font. I’m tempted now to try making up new encryption schemes for fun and challenge people to solve them. I’m sure it’s been done before, but not by me!

I was driving home listening to the local pop music radio station putting out a call for people to apply to be a judge for this year’s Saint John Idol, a city-size radio based version of more well known television shows. Then they stated playing the same song I heard on my drive into work eight hours earlier—a song which annoys me at the best of times—so I promptly switched to CBC radio. There, Steve MacLean was talking about how the listeners could apply to be an astronaut. To summarize, people who listen to top forty radio can become judges in a local talent contest. Listeners of CBC can become astronauts.

Meanwhile I had an argument with my dad about why I don’t use Microsoft Office. Even if Microsoft Office was the best office suite available, if Word was the best word processor, if Excel was the best way to handle data, etc etc, I would still not use it since it depends on the user becoming dependent on it. Microsoft products dominate in the business world mainly because that’s what everybody uses. I, coming from the academic world of LaTeX and PDFs, was astounded to realise that *.doc files are what people actually expect documents to be.

My dad’s argument is that it does what he needs it to do and that’s all that matters. He doesn’t care that he and the rest of the business world are held hostage by Microsoft. Unless a competing office suite can open, edit, and save Microsoft formated files exactly as the native Microsoft programs would do, it has no chance of taking any market share from Microsoft Office. Open Office tries this—and is able to do a lot of things Office can’t, like save as PDF—but it isn’t perfect. The problem is that Microsoft has no interest, as far as I know, in making sure its document formats are understandable by other software in the same way that PDFs or plain text is specifically designed to be. It would be bad for business if you didn’t need Office to use the same Office formats that everybody else uses! The way it’s set up now, it’s bad for consumers instead. But what sense does it make to write a document that you want other people to read and use a format that doesn’t guarantee they can actually read it?

It boggles the mind to think that people are okay with the fact that they’ll have to upgrade to the latest versions of Office as they come out even if the program gets worse. Like XP and Vista, plenty of people are avoiding upgrading to the latest Office because it isn’t as good. But what alternative do they have? People will start saving files in the latest format, and you’ll need the latest Office to see them as they were intended to be seen.

To get back to the point, if you’re communicating with people you better be sure you’re following some sort of standard so that you know the person on the other end will be able to read what you give them. The internet, email, wireless, and cell phones are examples of this. The exact software package shouldn’t matter. (Meanwhile even the latest version of Internet Explorer doesn’t obey formatting standards!)

To get even more to the point, open standards that anybody can understand, read, and follow exist to improve our efficiency and save us from mangled files. Also, they need to be spelled out explicitly so that everybody is aware that people 6′3″ will get their kneecaps shattered if they need to eject from a jet in the astronaut training program.

And that’s why I’m not going to be an astronaut.

• Shooting fish in a barrel actually is easy.
• Milk is the best treatment for spicy-mouth.
• A bull in a china shop doesn’t do very much damage.
• Elephants really are afraid of mice.

Thanks, Mythbusters.

Also, the roads in Sydney are alive. Or at least, medians on the Harbour Bridge can crawl across the road to different lanes. The video of cars swerving around them as they moved was hilarious. Thanks, Daily Planet.

Overall, a fun evening with the Discovery Channel.

PS: If you google “harbour bridge”, the first hit is the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the second is the Saint John Harbour Bridge. Hooray for my town.

One of the things I had to do as part of my big move was pack up my DSL modem and send it back to the service provider. They had told me to take it to a FedEx location and send it with their account number, so naturally I went online to FedEx.ca to look for the nearest location. My search turned up FedEx World Service Center at 1 Place Ville Marie.

Now, I knew where Place Ville Marie is, but I wanted to make sure it wasn’t some other Ville Marie, since I’ve made that mistake before (Ville St-Laurent and Blvd St-Laurent are two very different places). I clicked on the link for a map and driving directions, put in my postal code again, and was given this:

Now I’m no geographer, but I’m pretty sure that is not the shortest drive from the McGill campus to Place Ville Marie. Some of the driving directions included:

…
4. Take ramp right for SR-99 South toward Bakersfield / Los Angeles (173.2 km)
5. At exit 24, take ramp right for SR-58 East / Bakersfield Tehachapi Hwy toward Tehachapi / Mojave (202.8 km)
6. Take ramp left for I-15 North toward Las Vegas (647.7 km)
7. At exit 132, take ramp right for I-70 East toward Richfield / Denver (808.2 km)
8. Keep left onto I-76 East (301.8 km)
9. Keep straight onto I-80 East (571.6 km)
10. Keep left to stay on I-80 East (191.5 km)
11. At exit 123A, take ramp right for I-35 North / I-80 East toward Chicago / Minneapolis (312.5 km)
…

Estimated travel time: 44 hour(s), 39 minute(s), 18 second(s) for 4847.9 kilometres of travel.

I must walk damn fast because I made that trip in about 15 minutes. I really wonder how FedEx manages to deliver anything in a timely manner with geography skills like that.

By tomorrow afternoon I will no longer be a Montrealer. My transcript doesn’t quite say “graduated” yet, or whatever it is transcripts are supposed to say at this point, but all the appropriate boxes under the “Recommendations” heading say “yes” and faculty approval is pending. It’s as good as done. Never mind the fact that I got my grad school acceptances months ago…

The fact that I’m moving didn’t settle in until I took all the art, posters, and calendars off the walls. While half the floor is two or three feet deep in junk, everything at about eye level is boring blank white. That was the trigger. This doesn’t feel like my home anymore.

The rest of the job has just been rearranging the junk on the floor into more manageable piles. It was funny how simply dumping out a full drawer and rearranging everything would suddenly free up half the space. Everything could be laid out nicely in its place, in roughly a single layer along the bottom no less. “Nice”, I thought, “now I’ll actually be able to find stuff in there”. But then it occurred to me that with all that extra space, I could just cram more stuff in. Which is exactly what I did. So now the drawer is just as full but twice as heavy, and solidly packed so you can’t actually move anything aside to get at something underneath.

I also put all my textbooks into the same box.

Now at the same time this doesn’t feel different from any other May. I’ve never spent the summer in Montreal, so packing up my stuff at the end of the winter semester is nothing new. I wonder if moving to grad school will feel any different from coming back to McGill. A new school, sure, but functionally I don’t know if much will change. More of the part I like, at least, and less of the stuff I don’t. That’s really all I can ask. That’s really all I’m aiming for.

If you ask what I did on just about any day in the month of April, if I answered honestly chances are pretty good that I watched some Battlestar Galactica. The miniseries in 2003 and the opening episode of the television series were amazing. Then it got boring for a season or so, and then more interesting again.

The basic idea is that a race of robots (Cylons) built by some faraway colonies of humans rebelled and killed everybody, and are now hunting down the last survivors in a rag tag fleet of spaceships, while both sides try to find Earth. The Cylons now have 12 humanoid models that are indistinguishable from the real McCoy. Of these, seven have been known for a while, and the remaining “Final Five” have been something of a mystery that the first seven don’t talk about. At the end of the third season, four of the final five were revealed, and now the big question on everybody’s mind is who that last one is.

And now begin the spoilers
(more…)

“Butt! The butt! I want the butt!”
— My Ponyboy

I miss you already.

I’m coming up to a big move, and as such I’m faced with the problem of cramming everything I own into the back of a van. A big part of the solution, as it has been every time before, is to reduce the amount of stuff that I actually own.

The first to go were the many binders of notes I have collected over my undergraduate career. When the course is freshly over it’s sometimes hard to part with these, especially since most of the courses I’ve taken had a Part Two hot on their heels. Now that there are no more Part Two’s, the hardest part was hauling the bag of paper down to the curb on recycling day.

Textbooks were a similar case. I went to Haven Books Haven Books about a week ago to drop off about 15 textbooks ranging from anthropology and ethics to astrophysics and quantum mechanics. A select few—those which may be a legitimate resource in graduate school—are still on my bookcase. The fun thing about Haven was that with each textbook consigned, if the same book already exists at the store they tell you what it’s price is. One book I was going to sell for $10 was already there for $40. Ok, I thought, I might as well raise my price to $20—I still wanted it to sell, after all. Another, which I was putting on for $5, was there already for $20. Again, I could have raised the price, but considering that the book retails brand new for only $15, I didn’t think it was a smart move.

The really fun part has come today, after having put some things on craigslist. Who knew that minidiscs were in such high demand? And from middle aged immigrants no less! I’ve had no fewer than five phone calls in the four hours since the ad went live, all with different European accents, all wanting me to deliver, and a few strong opinions about proper craigslist etiquette.

Apparently, as I was told by one particularly cranky guy, it shouldn’t matter that I’ve already promised the MDs to another guy and am simply waiting for him to pick them up. It should be first come, first served. Personally I wonder how the rules of shotgun could be adapted to this situation. Are transactions which happen primarily by telephone subject to the line-of-sight rule, for example? In any case, as I’m the owner of the goods in question, I think it’s only fair that I set the rules of sale. I told him to call back tomorrow and if they’re still here they’re his. Maybe I should be more strict and demand that until the money is in my hands, no sale has been made.

As long as I avoid someone showing up at my door to collect something that is no longer here, I’ll be happy.