A note on Hasek

I remember Hasek being awesome, in his prime.  I knew he was the best in the league, but still wasn't aware of just how good he was.  This graphic, via twitter, points out a couple of things.

First, for six years in a row, Hasek was number one.  But more than that, his worst year was his only one that was worse than the best of the rest of the league, over that whole time span.

And that ignores how far above average he was, which is also pretty amazing.

Update: During Hall of Fame induction speech, Hasek gave a shoutout to the Caps new goalie coach, Mitch Korn.  Knew a bit about Korn's work in Nashville; hadn't realized he was Hasek's coach during that insane run.  Looking forward to seeing what he can do with Holtby and Gru.

Computer historical notes

Listened to latest The Talk Show, and had a couple of thoughts about it.

1) the hole punch for floppy disks had to do with pretending disks were double-density, not with write protection. All discs bought blank had a movable tab to affect writability. If you wanted to overwrite a Bard's Tale disc (which probably didn't have that tab), you'd just tape over the hole where the tab would go.

2) The note about Apple being ahead of its time was interesting. A case could be made that X-Windows belongs in that conversation as well. It's underpinnings (the X protocol) are largely the same, and it was first introduced (as W, for Windows; a later upgrade changed the name to X, since that was the letter after W) the same year.

3) I remember having to do OS installs (particularly OS/2, though windows was a bunch as well. And slackware was also quite a few) from stacks of floppies. Man, that was painful. I went through nerdgasm on my first OS/2 (Warp, I think) install from CD-ROM. Two minutes of configuration, and half an hour of waiting, rather than changing disks ever few minutes.

4) Talking about application languages, surprised he forgot that assembler was used before C or Pascal. With so little memory, it was about impossible to avoid.

A tax on both their houses

And I've had people tell me that paying taxes is the same as slavery (yes, Tea Partiers, that would be you).

Clickbatingest clickbait that ever was clickbaited

XKCD, as usual, is hilarious. I'm a bit behind on my reading of it (probably two months), but did have this clickbaiting headlines for old events pointed out to me.

I don't recognize all of the events mentioned, but some are really great. I wonder if the female suffrage one was implying how a great deal of the financial support for that movement came from Prohibition supporters. The penecillin one got me to look something up... I remember hearing of Fleming being supported (I thought it was adopted) by Churchill's father. The only reference I can find is this story from snopes, and maybe that's what I heard. Ah well.

The one about the Berlin Airlift, amused me. It also reminded me of my trip to Germany for a month-long exchange, when I was sixteen; that was where I first heard about the airlift. I think I didn't even know that West Berlin was completely surrounded by East Germany, before that trip (which explains why the capital of the country moved to Bonn during that... interregnum, for lack of a better term).  Anyway, hearing about that airlift in the Rathaus in Berlin was pretty cool.

The 1968 reference, I had to look up. I knew about two of the three assassinations, but didn't realize they were that year. Also, I had forgotten that JFK was five years earlier (I had assumed he was one of the ones to which reference was made).

The Challenger reference was very creative, but mightily ghoulish (though not as much as the Nazi and Titanic ones). Anyway, the whole collection was fantastic; the idea was amazing.

Where'd that word come from?

I recently discovered a fascinating book called the Etymologicon.  I can't remember where I ran across it, but the title got me curious enough to buy it.

Since taking Latin in High School (let's hear it for Catholic education), I've been very interested in etymologies.  I even bought the Compact OED some years ago (I'd love to get the full one, but that's prohibitively expensive, plus would take a ridiculous amount of shelf space), just to explore that.

Well, building on that, and on his own readings, Mark Forsyth has organized an exploration through etymologies via short (2-3 page) stories that combine related words into a tapestry of morphology.

I'm actually still only twenty or thirty pages in, but it's fantastic reading.  Not really meant to be read in one sitting, but it makes for a number of very enjoyable sittings.  I'm looking forward to having read all of it.

Plus, I really need to start exploring his blog, The Inky Fool.  If the book's any indication, the blog will be fantastic (and heck, some of the stories are reprints from the blog).

Very funny, and very educational.

Farming Museum

I took my kids, today, to the Loudon Heritage Farm Museum.  A friend of ours was going, so we went along with them.

I wasn't too sure what to expect (thrown off by references to the Claude Moore Farm, which this was not.  This place is at Claude Moore Park in Sterling, however); I was expecting something with crops and brought only one lens, which would be good for that sort of thing.

The whole thing was inside, and dedicated to farming equipment (like an original McCormick Reaper) and kids activities (like a general store, and a fake cow that could be milked).  My son wasn't terribly thrilled for the most part, but my daughter had a blast once she found the kitchen with traditional implements (like an antique ice box, the second one I'd ever seen).  Although actually, the kids had as much fun with the door to the kitchen (which could be walked around, if the other kids weren't letting you in) as they did with the actual kitchen.  And my son did find some stuff to have fun with, it just took him quite a bit longer.

So despite the lack of good pictures (I'm just hoping I got some mediocre ones), we all had a good time.  And I was glad our friends were there, because, for once, the kids didn't want to do the same thing, so it was tough to keep track of them.  But despite the difficulty, they did stay out of trouble.

So we did end up having a good time; I just wish I'd taken a second lens (it would have been the only one I used).

Gloaming Gates

I was in the mood to read Paula Volsky's excellent Gates of Twilight recently. I'd read it before (twice, I think), but it had been quite a few years. I remembered liking the main characters quite a bit, but very little else. It took place in the same world as her also excellent Illusion, but had only the most tenuous of connections (to the point that I don't remember noticing the connection before). Whereas that one was a fictionalised (and tamed down) recreation of the french revolution, this one is a similar retelling of the British occupation of India. The main character is a mid-level functionary at the "british" embassy in ZuLaysa. He comes from a rich, and aristocratic family, whose largest embarassment was marrying, several generations ago, an "indian" princess. We quickly find out that, thanks to that heritage, combined with extensive curiosity and xenophilia, he can also blend in quite well with the natives. And the natives, thanks to several factors coming together, are getting restless and restive. One of those factors has to do with a local "God", and his main priest, causing problems. And that God, we find out in the prologue, is not a native of that earth. So there is certainly reason to think of him as a god. The other main character is a local princess (strictly speaking, I suppose, THE local princess). She's actually quite poor, thanks to Renille's compatriots, thouh she was educated in his country. That, combined with her mother's hatred of Renille's countrymen, makes for quite a few of the dynamics going on in the book. The tendency of the rest of the embassy workers to look down on Renille, comprises much of the rest. Can Renille keep the Avesquians from full-fledged revolt? And stay alive at the same time? And deal with the god problems? That's most of the plot. And as I mentioned, I liked the main characters quite a bit. I wouldn't call it a deep book, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Persian Prince

My wife got me Prince of Persia recently, about which I was a bit curious.

I had played the original game (back in 1990 or '91), but none of the subsequent follow-ups. I really wasn't sure how they were going to make a movie out of it.

It did live up to expectations in visuals; they were very nice. And, for that, I was definitely glad to have gotten it on Blu-Ray. As far as the quality of the movie itself, though, it was about as expected.

That is to say, it was ok. Reasonably entertaining, little to no depth, and as good a grasp of history as you'd expect from a Disney movie. Seriously, Alamut was founded in 246AD, while the Persian empire dates from approximately the fifth to third centuries BC. And the Hashishayun, the assassins, didn't get there until the late eleventh century AD (Judith Tarr, incidentally, wrote a fantastic novel centered around the assassins called Alamut). And it was only under the assassins that Alamut was considered holy. Nor was it anywhere near as grand as portrayed.

Yes, it looked quite impressive in the movie, but it was not a huge place. It was mostly just a fortress, not a center of civilization.

And as far as adapting the game; it had a few nods to the original game, but not a whole lot.

Overall, I'd rate it as fair. It isn't worth going out of your way to see, but the visuals might make it worth catching it if it's convenient. Oh, and Alanis had a nice song for the closing credits (though I could have sworn it was Tori Amos).

Other shoe dropped

Well, two very disappointing nights in a row for the Caps. They spotted the opposition a couple of goals, came back, but failed to secure a win both times.

The first could very reasonably be blamed on the officiating, and the goal that was called back for no apparent reason. After watching the replay on that a number of times, I can't figure out why they decided to wash it out.

In any event, going down by a bunch is certainly no recipe for success, no matter how good you are, so perhaps they deserved it.

The only small bit of consolation is that they scored five in each of the games, which is enough to get them to a four goal per game average. And the hat tricks in three consecutive games is kind of neat (Ovie, Laich, and Semin, in order), especially without any hat tricks in the previous fifty-eight games. But we'd definitely rather have the wins.

I hope they'll use the Olympic break to get back in sync, because they've definitely been out of sync overall for the last several games.

And as an update to my previous post, I did a bit more searching for teams averaging four goals a game late into the season. The '06-07 Sabres got closer than the aforementioned Red Wings, with 222 goals through sixty games. And the '05-06 Sens were even better than those Red Wings, with nine more on the season, and managed to keep that four goal/game average through 64 games. In fact, through 61 games, they were exactly where these Caps are, at 244 goals. I guess we'll see what happens the rest of the way; those Sens ended up with 3.83 goals/game, about .75 over league average that year (though, to be fair, the average that year was about a quarter goal higher than it is this year).

But unless I missed someone else, those are the only three teams to score over 300 goals in a season since the '95-96 Penguins, powered by Lemieux, Jagr, and Francis. That team managed nearly four and a half goals per game in a league averaging π.