Do you want your possessions identified? (y/n)

I have been playing the new version of NetHack on the cube. As always, my games rarely last more than 20 minutes, as I excitedly ramp up in power and then lose it all at once. None of my characters this session have survived the gnomish mines, which is pretty pathetic.

I have to say, though, that my first YASD under this new version was pretty impressive. I stupidly put on a pair of unidentified boots in a store, which were of course cursed boots of levitation, and I had to pay for them before angrily floating out the door. Well, OK, I thought, I'll try this scroll; maybe it's a remove curse. Oops, it was an earthquake scroll, which has surrounded me with boulders... none of which I can push out of the way, due to lack of leverage, thanks to the floaty-boots. Whee! (Actually, I quit before I officially died of starvation.)

I hope that somebody makes a really-real Aqua port of NetHack besides the "official" QT-based one. I can deal with the chunky tile graphics (I mean, c'mon, it's NetHack) but the UI is pretty awful by modern standards, particularly with the preferences dialog. I'm not sure if I'd have the patience to figure it out were I new player who didn't learn the controls by originally playing the game on a Linux console (and thus expecting no better).

Dowsing

I followed through with yesterday's discovery, came to the library, and succeeded in finding that elusive algorithm. Hurray. Pleased to find it doesn't involve math any hairier than prime numbers and basic graph theory (the latter of which my software can already handle, since it treats chemical compounds as undirected graphs). Hmf... I really should learn some more math to alleviate fears of possibly running into linear algebra AAAARGH! and whatnot. This fall, I shall do this. Yes. So say I.

Have explored enough of the HMS library to discover the best wireless reception points (yes, I did in fact wander hesitatingly around the floor holding my laptop before me like a divining rod, but I'll bet you dollars to donuts that many if not all who saw me knew exactly what I was doing), and to conclude that I should probably start including a short cat-5 cable among my backpack's standard contents. Nearly every power plug in the library has an Ethernet drop beside it; wow. (And there are many power plugs.)

Phineas' headbone and the other anatomical curiosities aren't viewable on Sundays, but other interesting artifacts lie scattered around the main part of the building, including some centuries-old Harvard steins, a book illustrated by Bruegel the Elder, and giant oil paintings of doctors hard at work during various parts of the second millenium (inlcuding the inevitable "guys with ruffled collars dissecting a cadaver" one).

Math geek link OTD

Found during my recent adventures: The Prime Pages.

Church

So I had a fun & creepy dream this morning after I shut off my alarm by turning on the radio, which (since my radio dial is permanently welded to WBUR) was doing its weekly broadcast of some church service. My dream was simply the fabrication of a visual track to attend the audio input. So, I sat in church all morning.

I think that the church iRL is Unitarian Universalist, and since I have never attended a UU ceremony in the waking world, my dream-self had a bit of sport with envisioning it. I most strongly recall that the whole place had a heavy death-fetish thing going on, highlighted by the fact that the priest had small shadows cast upon her face as she spoke, giving her the semblance of empty eye sockets, bare cheekbones, and exposed teeth. The shadows came from some contrivance of projected light originating from the rear of the church; oddly, the projectionist seemed to have trouble keeping the shadows stable, and so they wiggled and crawled around the priest's face -- independently of one another.

I woke up to someone reading the story of Jesus' baptism, and my first conscious thought was: what exactly happened, there? IIRC, when someone in Scripture is "filled with the Holy Spirit", they cease to act normally for a while; they've been pinged by the Divine and follow unknowable orders. And lo, Mark writes how, in Jesus' case, "the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness." But: how, exactly? Did he flip out, zapped by the VALIS, and run whooping off into the desert as soon as John T.B. pulled him from the water? Or was this a trial he knew he'd make, of which the baptism was the final, calculated preparation (but which observers might not have expected)? And did anyone go with him, and huh huh huh? This is the first time that I've been presented with this story since high school and maybe before, and I guess I'm just disappointed with what now strikes me as weak narrative.