Tag: geek

The Ministry for the Future of Slightly Confusing Narrators

I recently finished Kim Stanley Robinson’s near-future climate science fiction novel “Ministry for the Future” (affiliate link), and immediately bought a hardback copy of it to give to a loved one since I couldn’t share the ebook. It had been on my reading list since publication last fall, but the recent unsurvivable heatwave in Jacobabad, Pakistan and severe heatwave on the west coast of North America increased my sense of urgency to read it. Ezra Klein called it the most important book he read in 2020, in an interesting short thread (which links to an interview with KSR, as well):

It felt like an incredibly important read once I got into it, but I initially found it quite confusing. The book shifts narrators almost every chapter, and it’s not always obvious who is who until quite a bit of context emerges in a given chapter, which I found a bit frustrating. When I switched to listening to the audiobook (affiliate link), I found that they’d chosen to have different voice actors – 11 in total – read the various chapters.

Since I couldn’t find a “key” to the chapters online, I figured I’d make one. I wrote down who I think each chapter is, to the best of my reading and listening ability. I had a hard time identifying a couple of the named voice actors, but I think the chapter list will help a lot with reading comprehension on the book itself. I tried to keep the list as spoiler-free as I could, but I still don’t recommend reading the rest of this post before you get to the relevant chapter in the book.

The chapter names are the character’s name when known, with their accent, or just a description of the accent. I tried to hit the right balance of “enough to place the character” but “not so much that I spoil the chapter.” Some of the accents are very broad – if anyone can place “African woman”‘s accent more precisely, for example, please do leave a comment.

“Exposition Guy” I originally called “Climate Exposition Guy” because many of the chapters he voices are full of Climate Facts, but then he ends up being the narrator for a number of other expository chapters as well. He also voices most of the riddle chapters; I only included spoilers (behind a click) for the couple where the answer wasn’t stated explicitly in the chapter. I’ve also included a few spoiler-ful thoughts on the novel at the bottom of the post; I’ll also leave a comment that folks can nest any spoiler-y discussions under.

Chapter List

  1. Frank (American accent)
  2. Exposition Guy – Riddle
    Click for riddle answer the sun
  3. Exposition Guy (American accented man)
  4. Mary (Irish accented woman)
  5. Indian man
  6. Exposition Guy
  7. Frank’s friend, American accented man
  8. Exposition Guy
  9. Mary
  10. Older-sounding Indian man (geo-engineering pilot)
  11. Exposition Guy
  12. Exposition Guy
  13. Frank
  14. Libyan Doctor
  15. Badim’s Assistant
  16. Exposition Guy
  17. Smarmy and Gruff English-accented dialogue
  18. Frank
  19. Spanish-accented man? Fishing boat captive
  20. Exposition Guy
  21. Posh English man
  22. Exposition Guy, glaciology edition
  23. Frank
  24. Exposition Guy
  25. Mary
  26. Frank
  27. Mary
  28. Exposition Guy
  29. Glacier Pete
  30. Exposition Guy
  31. Exposition Guy
  32. Mary + Dick (Australian-accented man)
  33. Child of Kali
  34. Badim’s Assistant
  35. Refugee – Arabic accented man
  36. Exposition Guy
  37. Libyan Doctor’s Daughter (Emna or Hiba)
  38. Smarmy and Gruff English-accented dialogue
  39. Sarcastic American man
  40. Exposition Guy
  41. African woman
  42. Janus Athena
  43. Exposition Guy – Riddle
  44. Glacier Pete
  45. Mary
  46. Exposition Guy – Riddle
  47. Frank
  48. Libyan Doctor’s Wife
  49. Exposition Guy
  50. Mary
  51. Exposition Guy
  52. Indian man (different from 5 and 10)
  53. Exposition Guy – Riddle
  54. Mary
  55. French woman
  56. Mary
  57. Glacier Pete + American woman narrator (maybe voiced by the same person as Janus Athena?)
  58. Spanish woman
  59. American woman
  60. Mary
  61. Exposition Guy
  62. Swiss German woman
  63. Mary
  64. Exposition Guy
  65. African woman (different character than 41)
  66. Riddle (woman narrator)
    Click for riddle answer carbon atom
  67. Exposition Guy
  68. Mary
  69. Exposition Guy
  70. Exposition Guy
  71. Badim’s Assistant
  72. American man
  73. Exposition Guy
  74. Frank
  75. Exposition Guy
  76. American Navy servicewoman
  77. Exposition Guy – Riddle
  78. Badim, I think? not 100% sure on this one
  79. Frank
  80. Spanish farmer woman
  81. Mary
  82. American man
  83. Russian woman / Tatiana’s friend
  84. Mary
  85. Narrator Medley
  86. Mary
  87. American man
  88. Exposition Guy – Riddle
  89. Mary
  90. Smarmy and Gruff English-accented dialogue
  91. Mary
  92. Syrian refugee woman
  93. Glacier woman (same as 57, American accent)
  94. Mary
  95. Exposition Guy – Riddle
    Click for riddle answer the Earth
  96. Mary
  97. Exposition Guy
  98. Badim’s Assistant
  99. Smarmy and Gruff English-accented dialogue
  100. Mary
  101. Hong Konger narrator
  102. Mary
  103. Hawaiian narrator
  104. Mary, and Badim’s assistant (Trudi)
  105. Syrian refugee woman
  106. Mary

Narrators

Here are the voice actors, plus who I think they voice, to the best of my guessing ability – several of them use fairly thick accents in their readings which make it hard to compare to the samples I found of other recordings where they speak in what is presumably their own accents.

  1. Jennifer Fitzgerald Mary
  2. Fajer Al-Kaisi ?
  3. Ramon de Ocampo Sarcastic American
  4. Gary Bennett Exposition Guy + Riddles
  5. Raphael Corkhill Smarmy English man
  6. Barrie Kreinik Unsure – her other samples also have an Irish accent but her voice is quite different from Jennifer Fitzgerald’s.
  7. Natasha Soudek Janus Athena, and Glacier woman
  8. Nikki Massoud Arabic-accented woman, probably plays both the Libyan doctor’s wife and daughter
  9. Joniece Abbott Pratt African woman
  10. Inés del Castillo Spanish woman?
  11. Vikas Adam Several of the Indian narrators, I think

If you have corrections or better descriptions for any of the chapters, please feel free to comment or email me (leigh at this domain name). I’m particularly curious if anyone is able to ID the voice actors in various chapters, though it’s more of a desire for comprehensiveness than necessary to decode the chapters 🙂

My thoughts on the book (contains some spoilers)

  • There aren’t enough frumpy middle-aged women science fiction protagonists and I really liked Mary as a character.
  • Shout out to Frank working hard on his PTSD with EMDR, and honestly being kind of a mess throughout the whole book.
  • I groaned as soon as I saw the word “blockchain” as an inveterate blockchain/cryptocurrency skeptic, but I think the “carbon coin” idea is one of the more plausible and interesting cryptocurrency ideas I’ve heard of.
  • I appreciated that Janus Athena’s non-binary identity was acknowledged but in a casual, normalized way.
  • The Hong Kong chapter broke my heart – the book went to press last October just after the pro-democracy protests there ended.
  • Poor Glacier Pete 😢.
  • I was stoked to learn that the core premise of the book – an agency specifically tasked with acting on behalf of the rights of future generations – is rooted in present-day climate litigation premised on the core idea of intergenerational equity. Fascinating stuff.

Return of the blog

Just a shade under two years after my blog first went kaput, it’s back. 2 VMs, one MySQL data recovery, and an absurd amount of time fussing with DNS later, it’s back.

I’m using wordpress.com this time around instead of fussing with my own setup; many of the plugins for which I self-hosted are now part of the core featureset, so I’m going to give this “cloud” business a run for it. I’ll probably fuss with themes a bunch more, so don’t be surprised if next time you’re here things are unrecognizable.

One thing I was frustrated by the last time I went to set up hosted wp was the way they expect you to set up your DNS if you want to do domain mapping; it turns out it’s pretty simple to map your domain directly to their set of IPs.  Once you have your domain mapping paid for and set up (from the “Store” link in the dashboard), do the following:

dig @ns1.wordpress.com example.com A

Then assign to example.com’s DNS the 6 A records that WordPress’s nameserver gives you.

At some point in the future they may change those IPs and your blog will stop working etc etc (which is why they’d rather you use their DNS instead) but for now that’ll do the trick.

This is fairly obvious stuff once you know what to look for but I haven’t seen it documented on the web, so enjoy 🙂

-Leigh

Magnetic fingernails

Background

A few weeks ago I went and got my nails done to try to rid myself of a life-long habit of biting my nails.  Some time later, I realized that the goop they put on my nails would be plenty to hold a small magnet and give me a sixth sense, as several others have done via subdermal magnetic implants.

ObDisclaimer before I go into the technical details: consult with a doctor/lawyer before doing this.  Consider carrying some kind of documentation (and a nail file) in case you have a medical emergency and need to be stuck in an MRI.  You may break things / lose data / get contact dermatitis from nail goo / kill kittens with your new magnet superpowers.  Don’t blame me :p

The basics of nail enhancements (the industry term; they are better known as fake nails 🙂 ) are as follows: your natural nails get filed down, and acrylic or gel is applied in a multi-stage process.  With gel, the nails need less filing, and each layer gets cured under a UV light.  If the technician uses a combination of powder and liquid, you’re getting acrylics.  Even if there’s a UV light involved – powder means acrylics.  Some crappy salons will just put a UV topcoat on and call it “gel” – be warned.  Also, many nail techs are used to working with biters, so even if you have sad stubby nails, don’t despair – they have a whole bag of tricks involving plastic forms, more substantial gel, etc. to make your fingertips looks unbitten.

Implementation

Pablos, [redacted] and I had our magnetic manicures done by Aiden at the Gene Juarez salon in downtown Seattle. You can reach them at 206.326.6000, and ask for her specifically.  She did a fantastic job and didn’t even blink at our weird request.  Expect to spend just under $100 with tip – it’s a fancy salon.  Bring your own magnets – we used the ones Nate recommended, tiny parylene-encases magnetic stirrers from here.  They are a buck a piece and come in a minimum quantity of 100, so find some friends who want to do this too.  Pablos’ and [redacted]’s are clear gel with white tips; mine are all clear gel, with pink polish over top, because I like pink.  One of the benefits of the gel we used – as acetone doesn’t dissolve it, I can take the polish off and change it.  It was fairly thick, with a noticeable bump, seen here in profile.  The gel is lightweight though, and overall my nails feel less heavy than when I had acrylics (with no magnets) on.  The magnets in mine are visible through two layers of polish; I expect another layer or a darker colour would address that, if you care.

During Saturday evening’s [redacted], a bunch of folks also had them stuck on with acrylics, using one of the cheap kits (made by Kiss Nails, I think)  one can get at the local pharmacy / big box / beauty supply etc.  Clamoring and Willow from Jigsaw Renaissance lead the way on that part of the project.

Results

I can feel ferrous materials strongly and easily with the backs of my fingers.  It’s a very gentle pull, and is totally fascinating.  I can’t feel much of anything through the pads of my fingers.  I feel a very light buzz near things with strong magnetic fields, but it’s really subtle to the point where I’m not yet convinced it’s real – I expect I’ll get more attuned to it in the next little bit.  For now it just tickles.zomg magnetfingers

I can pick up pretty substantial objects, like the magnet from inside an old hard drive.  I’m bad with weights but it’s probably 50 grams.

Aiden was a pro at getting the polarities all lined up, but you’ll want to think about how to arrange them.  Fingers sticking together or repelling?  I went with sticking together.  Hours of entertainment, I tell you.

So far I haven’t managed to erase any credit cards or hard drives with them, and I’ve been told by others that these magnets just don’t have enough power to do either.

Oh and as for nailbiting – while I haven’t gone back to natural nails yet, the enhancements I’ve tried – gels without magnets, acrylics without magnets, and now gels with magnets – have all made my fingers completely incompatible with my teeth.  I simply have no desire to bite on them due to the foreign texture, and the general neatness of the nails.  I don’t know for sure that I’ve broken the habit, but it seems to be a damn effective temporary measure.

After-care

Nails with enhancements need to be “filled” about every 2-3 weeks as they grow out from the cuticle, and breaks need to be fixed promptly or they will get worse and you may end up in pain.  You’ll pay about 1/2 to 2/3 the cost to have a fill done compared to the original work, and a few bucks per nail if they break.  I do not yet know how these will grow out.  I expect to be filing them down until the magnet is a half millimetre from the “free edge” (outward edge), then letting them grow out a bit so I can clip the magnets off.  I’ll probably have a fill done right at week 2, and add a second set of magnets at week 4.  YMMV depending on the size of your fingernails and how fast they grow.

Product reference

Aiden used CND‘s Brisa gel system on us.  If you’re into colours, look for a salon that does Calgel’s coloured gels, or Opi Axxium.  Those come in both file-off and soak-off varieties – the latter soak off with acetone, but are a bit softer from what I’ve read.  CND has a new product called Shellac which is more like a UV cured polish, but which may also be strong enough to retain the magnets.  YMMV; please let me know what works for you!  There are also plenty of products I didn’t list – these are the brands that seemed to have decent reputations on the intertubes and Amazon reviews.

New Ubuntu = awesome!

I just rebooted my work desktop into Karmic Koala, the new release of Ubuntu, my preferred distribution of GNU/Linux.  I don’t have much substantive to say, but the qualitative experience has so far been pretty amazing.

Not only did I get to work all day while the upgrade was downloading, only having to reboot at the very end, but everything worked as I expected when I rebooted – which is to say that the only thing which didn’t work was VMWare, which I expected to not work as with every kernel upgrade.  I might even take this as an opportunity to give Virtualbox a proper try (it was less than amazing last time I did).

Let me make that really clear – I only had about twenty minutes of downtime for the entire upgrade, and it would have been less if the installer had left upgrading Firefox until the end, as that was the only thing which broke (and even then, only partly – no new urls, but clicking through links was fine) while the upgrade was going on.  Try that with Windows 🙂

Things feel just a little snappier, just a little shinier.  I’m really impressed so far.  The new theme and icon set is lovely.

If you’ve been putting off trying out Ubuntu or Linux in general, now’s a great time to start!

http://www.ubuntu.com/

Papercuts

No-context-needed IRC log time!

-!- zfe [n=Gianluca@88.252.29.47] has joined #ubuntu-women
<zfe> is this the kitchen?
<zfe> who would make me a sammich?
<redacted> zfe: No this is not the kitchen
<zfe> aren’t you women?
<redacted> zfe: you are welcome to go into your own kitchen and make yourself a sandwich.
<redacted> zfe: please read the channel guidelines in the topic
-!- mode/#ubuntu-women [+o hypa7ia] by ChanServ
<zfe> ok i will while you make me a sammich
-!- mode/#ubuntu-women [+b *!*=Gianluca@88.252.29.*] by hypa7ia
-!- zfe was kicked from #ubuntu-women by hypa7ia [http://xkcd.com/322]

Nicknames redacted to protect the innocent.

Living in the Future, or, HackLab Buys a Cupcake

On September 1st, I sent an email to the HackLab discussion list asking for folks to commit. Less than 24 hours later, members and non-members alike stepped up and pledged $700 in addition to my initial commitment of $200. Our MakerBot Batch 7 CupCake CNC will ship in early October, hopefully in time for MiniSoOnCon!

3D printing is so amazing. This is the MITS Altair of a DIY revolution whose shape I’m not at all certain of. I couldn’t be more exited to see what the hacklabbers make and how we improve the machine, too.

In alphabetical order, the donors were:

3ric Johanson
Alex Leitch
Byron Sonne
Chad Mounteny
Cheryl Mok
Chris Pilkington
Dale Babiy
Dan Kaminsky
Eric from NYC Resistor
Kate Raynes-Goldie
Sergio Martns
Seth Hardy

Welcome to the future, folks.

-Leigh

Python Open Mike

One of the early results from the dialog the Python community is having about diversity issues is a new blog – Python Open Mike.  The idea is that there are folks out there who have something to say that’s relevant to the Python community, but who don’t necessarily keep a blog themselves.  Open Mike is a venue for their posts.    It’s moderated, but easy to post to via email, and syndicated on Planet Python.  Though it came out of the diversity mailing list, it’s not intended to be restricted to diversity issues.  So if you have something to say about Python and are disinclined for whatever reason to set up your own, feel free to step up to the Mike!

-Leigh

meshU 2009 – writing (more) secure software

Today at the meshU conference I gave a talk about secure programming, with a focus on the web.  There were 2 token slides for the C and C++ devs out there, which ended up working perfectly because there were only two people in the room who wrote C/C++ 🙂

I mostly touched on stuff from OWASP‘s vast collection of resources,specifically their top ten principles of secure programming, and their top ten web application vulnerabilities.  Slides are after the jump, but I wanted to include some related links to things which came up during the talk:

Enjoy the slides!  Slideshare messed up the formatting of the additional notes, so for full effect I’d download them from here.

Continue reading “meshU 2009 – writing (more) secure software” →

Xelerance Google Summer of Code

I’m pleased to announce that I’m working with Xelerance this summer to mentor students participating in the Google Summer of Code program.  We have a bunch of interesting ideas up and have been talking with potential participants on IRC (#xelerance-gsoc on irc.freenode.net).  We are mentoring three sets of projects, related to openswan, DNSSEC tools, and Off-The-Record Messaging.   If you’re interested in participating as either a student or mentor in any of these, I’m reachable at leigh at hypatia dot ca, and of course on freenode under the username hypa7ia.

This is the first year Xelerance (and I) have participated in the program.  I’ve been reading lots of the collected wisdom from previous years on the mentor email list and around the web.  I’ve really enjoyed talking with students so far and can’t wait to read the applications as they come in.

-Leigh