jerf.org is a website where I partition off the part of my life that makes for boring real-life conversation. In real life, you can go a very long time without hearing me ramble about politics or the other things I go on about on this website. Going on about those things is the entire purpose of this website, whereas my music, TV, work life, and family life are saved for real life.

No Starch Press asked me to write a review of the new Haskell book, Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!. I started to write a section about myself and my view of Haskell for context, and realized that it really needed to be its own post as it grew to a length where it was self-indulgent to make it part of the review. But it fits as its own post nicely.

I have always had a romantic attraction to the "could have been"s, the aesthetics that die early or fail to become popular but feel like in an alternate universe just next door they could have been wildly successful. Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has always struck me like this; even as the Classical music period gave way into the Romantic period and harmonies get ever wilder until they run entirely off the rails in the twentieth century, it always felt to me like the Ninth could have been the foundation of a different aesthetic than the one we actually got. (A matter of opinion, of course.) It's a fully-formed masterpiece from the could-have-been.

I like to watch the "How the Movie Was Made" documentaries for movies from the Star Wars era up to the late ninties, because I love to see all the dead special effects techniques; the wonderful models, the animatronics, all the clever tricks they play, all interesting in exactly the same way that watching the documentaries for a 2010 movie are very uninteresting, seeing as how they all boil down to "And then we used a computer". I wonder what movies we'd be seeing if somehow computers were impractical for special effects and these techniques continued to be refined and honed.

And there's a smattering of other such things I enjoy. In the movie domain, many of them end up becoming what we call "cult classics", movies that may be awesome or may be fundamentally terrible but are above all else different. Buckaroo Bonzai, the David Lynch version of Dune, and, as telegraphed by my title, Tron.

A little hobby of mine has been quickly scanning over the spam that gets past my filter for random names that coincidentally managed to be someone I recognize. Sometimes I even scan the spam folder itself. I've read many thousands of names over the past few months, but today I have what may be my first hit: Sgt. George Lucas is in desperate need of assistance during his Iraq deployment, presumably something that involves large sums of money being transferred out of my bank account.

Every decade around this time, we get pedants who point out that since there was no Year 0, decades/centuries/millenniums start on 1. I observe that the Gregorian Calendar we use started in 1582, so not only was there no year 0, there was no year 1, year 2, year 3, ..., or year 1581. Therefore, true pendants should be insisting that decades start on twos, and centuries start on 82s, and millennia start on 582s!

Dear Democratic Supporters of the health care bills: You do realize you're supporting putting Republicans in charge of health care, right? Oh, sure, not this year or next. But it's only a matter of time until Republicans can pass bills again. Whether 2011, 2013, or 2017 or beyond, sooner or later it's going to be the Republicans in control of at least one house, the Presidency, and in pretty good shape in the other house.

I'm calling it: This is the year that Christmas officially enveloped Thanksgiving. With less than a week to go to Thanksgiving, the only channel I'm hearing more about Thanksgiving than Christmas is my family communications channels as we work out the plan for next week. Next envelopment to watch out for: The Presidential campaign enveloping the mid-term elections. The 2008 Presidential campaign effectively started mere days after the 2006 midterms.

This story about climate engineering reminded me: I strongly support climate engineering if properly analyzed, but I think that proper analysis is unlikely to be possible with most approaches. I strongly favor the development of space mirrors, because they are one of the few techniques that are both highly controllable and they also swing both ways. If it turns out some intervention is not working as we expect, we can actually stop intervening.

I've recently been enjoying Price Theory, an online textbook of economics. It hasn't stunned me yet, but it's nice to see it all laid out in a textbook style.

I was reading a rant about sci-fi physics (or the lack thereof), and it mentioned how Star Trek had a problem with the transporter being too powerful, requiring a series of increasingly-implausible reasons why it couldn't save the day today. I say "increasingly-implausible" not because it didn't make sense that the transporter would be disrupted by, well, everything, since in some sense that's exactly why they are totally impossible, but because by the end of the run of Star Trek, it is completely implausible that anybody would ever trust their lives to one of these disasters!