Damn you Battlestar Galactica and your mid-season finale!

Here I was, sure that since it was only ten episodes into the final season, BSG would last me through the summer, building up to its grand series finale. Then, they had to go start airing a promo on Space saying “THE LAST EPISODE UNTIL 2009!”

Spoilers below!
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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.

—

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.

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.

Just a quick note before I run out for the evening.

Nigh on three weeks ago, my hosting company’s server went down for some reason. After a week of everybody complaining and begging for answers, they finally announced that the server would be coming up again but that it was only to let us recover our sites and then shut the whole thing down.

Booberfish was homeless.

So I searched around for a bit and found a new hosting company (a Canadian one, by the way), and have spent the afternoon trying to bring everything back up. I know I should have an offline version to set everything up then upload all in one go, but I’m not that clever. So instead I’m putting it up in pieces and fixing bugs as they go.

Simultaneously to all that, I changed my Wordpress installation directory and reconfigured it to be a general content management system instead of just blogging software. I considered waiting three days and upgrading to version 2.5 as well, but decided that might be a bit much.

And now here we are. At the very least, the compendium and this blog seem to be working fairly well, even if not all the parameters are set right (it’s looking a little too orange in here, for example). I’ll get around to the galleries (entirely non-existent right now) and the other details later this weekend.

In the meantime, please try to ignore the broken links. I’d fix them, but I have a games night to attend.

I was tagged by this guy.

The rules:

• Link to the person that tagged you.
• Post the rules on your blog.
• Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
• Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
• Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

And here’s what I came up with:

1. I walk on my tiptoes through puddles and slush because my shoes have holes in the soles.
2. I’ve had the same hotmail account since about 1998, before it was owned by Microsoft, when it was called HoTMaiL, and when frames were a trendy design choice.
3. I’m addicted to bookdarts. Any book I read usually has about a dozen in them by the time I’m done with it, and non-fiction many times more. I buy them in bulk.
4. My maximum heart rate was last tested to be 197.
5. I often eat the same thing for dinner several days in a row, not because I make enough the first time for leftovers, but because it’s easier than thinking of something else to make with the same selection of food.
6. I can wiggle one ear.

I’m supposed to tag six people, but as it turns out I don’t know that many people who blog, so I’ll have to do a half-assed job of it: I’m tagging gablazes, awhinap, and spoonfulofpoon (because he clearly needs something to write about).

Thanks for the protection, Firefox. The only problem is, 71 of those popup blocks were from me clicking frantically on the link, hoping against hope that you’d get the point and let the popup through after you so nicely blocked it the first time.

I could swear there used to be a way to allow a popup window for one time only, based on using a modifier key when clicking. I’m just not comfortable enough with the website to add it to the whitelist. Who knows what other crap there might be on there. Maybe I don’t even know if I want this crap let through on future visits but just want to see it once to be sure. The whole process of adding to the whitelist, clicking, then figuring out how to remove it again is not exactly the picture of efficiency.

Ironically, after hunting down a Firefox extension that allows one time only popups, in order to install it I had to add the site to the whitelist for allowing pages to install software, install the bloody software, and then remove the site from the whitelist again (because who knows what other crap is on that site).

The extension didn’t work anyway, and Firefox continued happily blocking my precious popup. Oh god, I just realised—could it have been Internet Explorer that had that feature built in? Could it be that IE actually turned out to be better than Firefox at something? I can’t bear to think of it. I’m going back to my blissful Youtubing.

I’m going away for a few days and will be without my computer, thus no blog updates for you for a few days (as if I had been updating this thing more than every few days lately anyway). In the meantime, there’s a place I’ve found that I’m sure you can spend a good chunk of your time on. It’s called Jyte. You vote on claims made by anybody about anything, maybe make some claims of your own, make comments on claims, and earn mysterious “cred” from other Jyters. Some example claims of mine:

It’s a colossal waste of time, more so lately than even Facebook has been, and anybody on Facebook knows that that’s saying a lot. Enjoy.

I just got my first MP3 player. The original promise was a free iPod mini from my sister as a birthday gift, but the package that was supposed to contain said iPod turned out to contain a note about why there was no iPod and a guilt cheque to make up for it.

This turned out to be fine because with that cheque I was able to go buy my own MP3 player which was decidedly not an iPod, although it might be described as iPod nano-ish—a sexy little Samsung K3, in red of course. Almost by virtue of being not an iPod it is better than an iPod—its cheaper, has an FM radio, and is not a symbol of conformity.

I’m disappointed, however, in its navigation. In the same manner as the iPod, you can browse through songs based on their ID3 tag, selecting artists, albums, or genres. What I don’t like is that this browsing to find a single song is the same as setting the playlist, whereas I think the two things should be separate.

If I want to listen to Jay Brannan’s Soda Shop, as I sometimes do, I can do it by finding Jay’s name in the artists list. However, Soda Shop is the only song by him that I have, so my playlist is that one song over and over. If I want to listen to the whole album (being the soundtrack from Shortbus) I have to have to foresight to navigate to it from Albums > Shortbus > Soda Shop instead of Artists > Jay Brannan > Soda Shop.

Similarly, if I’m playing all tracks on shuffle, hit upon Soda Shop, and decide I’d like to listen to the rest of the soundtrack, I have to backtrack to the main list, choose Albums, find Shortbus, and start the song again. There should be an option, while listening to a song, to change the playlist to other songs only by the same artist or from the same album, or even just to other playlists with that song on it, without having to stop the song.

The difficult part is putting in all the navigational tools you have at hand with a desktop music player like iTunes or Amarok while only using six or seven buttons. Amarok has a very nice way of queueing tracks (better than iTunes’s method) that I would love to see in a portable player. It would be nice as well to be able to add songs to playlists on the fly without necessarily playing them.

Most of these, if not all, are things that could be implemented on MP3 players today (and for all I know they might already be) rather simply. Just put an option to apply filters to the playlist according to album, artist, etc, another to queue the track, and another to add the track to some existing playlist. None of this qualifies as “future” features for navigation because there’s nothing that new and innovative about them.

The feature I would really like to see is one that requires a little more innovation and will be nice to see sometime down the road.

Have you ever been listening to a song and have it remind you of another one? That Jay Brannan song often brings to mind other songs from Shortbus just because they’re all from that same soundtrack. Sometimes, though, there’s a specific song that I want to listen to next, and it might not have anything to do with what I’m listening to. James Blunt’s Goodbye My Lover might conclude only to have me wanting to hear Boston and St. John’s by Great Big Sea, or Rip Slyme’s Joint might bring to mind something by HY. In these cases—even if my feature wishlist above is implemented—it’s a pain to go navigate through various menus or walk through the tracks to find it. What’s the solution?

The MP3 player should just know what I want to listen to.

Oh baby yeah.

If I start mentally humming the intro to A Moth is not a Butterfly after that Julie Delpy waltz from Before Sunset, the player should pick up on that and queue it up for me. Or maybe I’ll just keeping singing Butterfly to myself, in which case the player should realise I’d probably like to listen to it again. And, of course, if there wasn’t anything specific I wanted it would just default back to the standard playlist.

It wouldn’t even have to be that specific at first. There might be some way of just picking up on my mood, and the player could gauge what sorts of songs I might enjoy based on that. The software that came with my K3 already makes an attempt at classifying my music based on its style. Maybe if I’m feeling upbeat it would play an upbeat song for me, or if it saw I was drifting to sleep something more mellow. Hell, that’s 90% of the point right there anyway.

Does anybody have an old EEG machine we could modify and jury-rig onto some headphones? (For maximum brain proximity, of course.) If only I were an engineer/neuropsychologist I could whip something together, apply for a patent, and be making millions in no time.