Squeaky Time!

I think I’m starting to understand how to play with Squeak’s eToys environment. It helped to explore it with a five year old by my side.

In this environment, you give objects “scripts.” Scripts can contain primitive commands like “move forward 5” or “make a squeaking noise,” or tests like “Is ___ true? If so, __ if not __”, or even other scripts. Yep, it’s just like programming. Objects can tell if they’re overlapping other objects or other parts of their environment. Oh yeah — when I say “objects” I’m not just talking about abstract programming objects — one way to create a new object is to draw it with a pen. Another is to pull it out of a box, a box with rectangles and stars and other things. Once you’ve got an object you can give it a name and add scripts to it. Besides adding scripts you can manipulate it directly by grabbing it, dragging it around, resizing it, recoloring it, turning it sideways, whatever.

Oh, and the scripts — you can see them. They’re little boxes and you add commands to them not by typing, but by dragging little tiles onto the box. It’s amazingly easy.

A script can be “ticking,” which means it fires repeatedly until you stop it. It can also be stopped. Objects can turn their own or other objects’ scripts on or off.

By the time things started getting interesting, this is what was going on —

We had a little alien face made out of a little drawing my son had made with some eyes added to it. The alien had some scripts we’d written, like “crawl” which sent it forward slowly, and “move warble and turn” which sent it backwards a bit, made it turn, and made it make a warbling noise.

I at first had the idea of making a box which could clone the alien face, but I didn’t quite know how to do that… So I made a box which could tell if an alien was touching it, and turn blue if that was the case, and red if it wasn’t. OK, that was cool. But it was cooler when in addition to making it turn blue, it told the alien face to “move warble and turn.”

Now you could make the alien face crawl at the box, and when it hit, the box would flash blue and the alien would warble, turn, and back up — and then the crawl could keep going.

Then I made four copies of the box, and was happy to see they all had the same power of making the alien warble! I elongated them and made a cage out of them, and let the alien face bounce around inside back and forth. Twas cool. I made the alien face smaller so it didn’t hit so often, and could spend more time crawling, not constantly bouncing.

Before all this I’d drawn a little mouse and not done anything with it. I picked it up and started scripting it. First I called it “SketchMouse” but by this time my daughter had showed up and insisted it should be called “StickMouse,” so Stickmouse it was. I gave Stickmouse a script called “run” and made the stickmouse check to see if it was touching an alien, and if so, it would turn the StickMouse’s “run” script to “ticking” — and it would keep running until it wasn’t touching an alien anymore. I added a squeak to the mix; a mouse in Squeak should squeak!

Now the alien would run around bouncing off the walls, and when it happened to hit a mouse the mouse would squeak and wiggle out of the way.

Then I started cloning off a half dozen new Stickmice and let the fun begin!

What I took away from all this is that eToys isn’t about showing up with an idea of what you want to do and finding the tools to do it. It’s about building cool little things and seeing what happens when you tweak them and throw them at each other — seeing what emerges, that you would have never thought of before.

In retrospect I can also see much more effective ways I could have done things. First off, it was kind of silly to have all those paranoiac boxes waiting for an alien to show up so they could make it do a silly dance. Why couldn’t I just make the alien watch for boxes while it’s moving, and do its silly dance when it hits one? Then I’d have one entity “active” instead of a bunch of them.

Same thing with the mice — they were all watching out for that alien. Why couldn’t the alien have, say, triggered their “run away” script when it touched them, and then the “run away” script would itself have checked to see whether they’d escaped it and turned itself off when it was satisfied it had? Things like that.

And it’s all gloriously useless. It’s pure fun.

Freaky Book of the Week

Boppin’ around Barnes & Nobles, I came across Codex Magica by Texe Marrs. According to Marrs, the world is run by the Illuminati, also known by such names as “Masons,” “Satanists,” “Jews,” and “Catholics.” The book is profusely illustrated, largely with photographs of world leaders from all over the world and all over the political spectrum, with their gestures identified as secret Masonic/Illuminati hand gestures. Remember the U of T horn gesture the Bush family likes to flash? SATAN. (To be fair, Marrs was far from alone in interpreting it that way. The Norwegians sure know their Satanists, and they were fooled.)

As far as I can tell, there is no way to configure the human body in such a way that Texe Marrs could not find a Satanic/Masonic gesture being made by some part of it.

It’s a fun book in a twisted and demented kind of way.

It’s kind of like if the Rigorous Intuition guy were possessed by the spirit of Bob Larson. And then turned up to eleven. (Disclaimer: for all the weirdness, pessimism, and paranoia, I often enjoy RigInt because the blogger’s a thoughtful guy and often notices important connections between news events that otherwise might go unnoticed.)

“It was that young fool Farley!” The Mad Gasser of Mattoon

I’ve been meaning to post about this since I read it, but it’s all old media, you know. I read it on paper, in issue 216 of the Fortean Times. It’s an article by Jonathan Downes, a musician, cryptozoologist, and author, who’s been interested in the story of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, IL (aka the “Anesthetic Prowler”) for many years.

It happened back in September, 1945. For about a week there were reports of families waking up to a weird sweet smell that caused nausea and lightheadedness. The incident is commonly cited as an example of mysterious, spontaneous hysteria in a community, arising out of nowhere and disappearing just as quickly.

Anyway, Downes recently got a chance to visit Mattoon, and was surprised to find out that as far as the residents of the town are concerned, there is no mystery.

The journey was a real pilgrimage for Downes:

It was a strange experience standing in the warm, early summer rain outside the home where, 60 years before, the Kearney family had been attacked. For the first time, I understood why generations of American tourists would fly to London and stand in awe outside a building society in Baker Street, as they searched for the authentic Sherlock Holmes experience. I may have been six decades too late, but I was looking at one of the real ‘Mad Gasser’ locations, and nobody could take that away from me.

In one of his first encounters with a local from that neighborhood, an old man tending a grocery store, he passed himself off at first as a journalist researching life in the Midwest in the war years, but eventually dared to ask a question about his real interest:

I gritted my teeth and asked the old man whether he had heard of the Mad Gasser. Fully expecting ridicule, I was amazed by his answer. “Yeah, sure. It was that young fool Farley. His family used to own this store.” […]

It has always been implied that, like Jack the Ripper or Spring-heeled Jack, the culprit was never identified or caught, but this is simply not true. Everywhere I went in Mattoon I was told the same thing. Yes, of course they knew about the Mad Gasser — and they all knew who he was: a tragically disturbed young man called Farley Llewellyn.

This conclusion had already been publicized by Illinois historian Scott Maruna, in his 2003 book The Mad Gasser of Mattoon: Dispelling the Hysteria. Farley had lived in a trailer behind his parents’ store. He had been a chemistry major at the University of Illinois before coming home. He was alcoholic, and homosexual, and the target of rumor and gossip in the town because of this and because of his increasingly erratic behavior, which included chemistry experiments in his trailer which at one point, shortly before the attacks, caused an explosion that damaged the trailer badly. “Farley would never reveal what had caused the explosion, but Maruna believes that he had been synthesizing 1,2,2,2-tetrachloroethane(C2H2Cl4), which, as he writes, ‘is a clear, oily liquid that is extremely volatile, with a sweet, fruity odour. Breathing high levels of this can cause fatigue, vomiting, dizziness, and possibly unconsciousness.'”

If it was Farley’s gas behind the attacks, it couldn’t have been Farley behind all of them, because he was arrested on the 10th of September and there was one attack on the 11th. However, that attack was reportedly committed by someone short, plump, and wearing women’s shoes, which describes neither Farley nor the previous Gasser descriptions, but which does describe Farley’s two sisters, who were about as well integrated into the community as Farley himself was.

If the explosion did arise when Farley was synthesizing that gas, the gas would only have been effective through about September 11th, 1945.

Downes continues:

..I visited several shops and spoke to a number of the older members of the community I found there. Everybody knew of the Mad Gasser; everybody knew that it was Farley; and everybody told me that, because Farley’s father had been such a well-loved and popular member of the community, nobody had been prepared to pillory the family in public just because his son was insane. In order to protect the reputation of Farley’s family, the whole town had put up with 50 years of visiting UFO freaks, conspiracy theorists, and assorted nutcases…

Now there were no longer any living relatives, people were prepared to talk, and several told me they were happy to do so because — at long last — the myth of Mattoon’s Mad Gasser could be laid to rest.

It’s hard to describe how big a deal this is in terms of American Forteana, at least as I know it. It would be up there with discovering the ape suit used to fake the Patterson Bigfoot film (if it was faked…) — or, I don’t know, finding out that there was a secret military balloon project which was responsible for the “saucer crash” at Roswell but which couldn’t be discussed for decades because it was classified… No, wait. That actually happened. (Unless of course there’s something more sinister or strange behind that story…)

Anyway, there was no version of this article on the web to link to or I would have gratefully done so. I hope I haven’t over-quoted but I think this is information that should be more widely available, at least for those few people interested in such a topic.

Stylin’

The problem with the wordpress default theme is that it’s insanely complicated, especially in the header area.  Someone going in to edit it a bit “starting with the default” is in for a world of hurt, because it’s many many many many lines of CSS.

Inspired by this post a weekend ago, I ripped the guts out of the default theme and created a “minimal” theme with no css at all.  I intended to go in and recreate it as a thing of beauty, but I hadn’t the energy at the time.

I just got some energy, I guess, because I just opened up “minimal” again and added a very small amount of css to it and it’s starting to look nice again.  Things I’d still like to do as I write: pick a less garish color for links, since there are so many of them; unsquish the text on the right a bit; stuff like that.  Any other suggestions?  Any browsers it looks downright *awful* on?

The Scariest Guy in Town

TIME.com: The Scariest Guy in Town — Dec. 4, 2006 — Page 1:

As the new chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, Waxman will have free rein to investigate, as he puts it, “everything that the government is involved with.” And the funny thing is, Waxman can thank the Republicans for the unique set of levers he will hold. Under a rules change they put through in the days when they used the panel to make Bill Clinton’s life miserable, the leader of Government Reform is the only chairman who can issue subpoenas without a committee vote. […]

Waxman likes to point out that the House took 140 hours of sworn testimony to get to the bottom of whether Clinton had misused the White House Christmas-card list for political purposes, but only 12 hours on prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

Revenge against the Republicans would not be useful — it’d be sinking to, well, I won’t say “their level” as if viciousness were an inherent Republican trait; let’s just say the level they’ve preferred to play at for the last decade or two. But besides revenge there is reform. Investigation can punish, but it can also bring truth and clarity, and raise standards and level playing fields. There can be Nuremburg Trials, and Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Let’s hope for the latter.