Badass of the Week

Isabella of France
"No man ever excited her resentment who did not perish under its effect;
the king himself forming no exception to this fact."
Sharon sent me a link to the story of Isabella. It is told in a very understandable manor, not like what you find in those stuffy history books. It gives you a real feeling for the times. She makes all these modern tough talking punks look like pantywaists. Go read the whole thing.

Land Prices

When I was in Iowa a year ago I heard that farm land was going for as much as $10,000 an acre. This price is very dependent on the price of corn, or rather on what people expect the price of corn will be in the near future. I suspect the government's ethanol program has something to do with this.
    Yesterday I put up a post about a classic car auction taking place in Brothers, which is a small town in Eastern Oregon. I remarked that there wasn't much there, and Posthip Scott sends me this little notice from 1914.

Click to embiggenate.

Cyber Fish

Underwater fish-like drone from Poland.

I enjoyed watching this machine swimming. I am not quite sure what the fish-like fish at the end is. Is it a real fish, or another version of our drone dressed up to look like a fish?

Back to Bologna - Michael Dibdin

Back to Bologna - Michael Dibdin

Michael Dibdin has become one of my favorite authors. Unfortunately he is dead. Fortunately he wrote a number of books. This one has an entertaining and slightly convoluted plot. What follows is me exercising my memory to see if I could remember how it all fit together. To that end it is all spoilers, all the time.

What do we have here? A comedy of errors, perhaps? We have
- a college student and his refugee girlfriend,
- a spoiled rich kid and his gang of thuggish soccer fans,
- a caricature of a private investigator,
- a celebrity chef and his publicist,
- an aging senior police officer and his common law wife,
- a pompous windbag of a professor, and
- the dead owner of a soccer team (aka football club).
The rich kid and the college student are roommates. The college student out of financial necessity, the rich kid because of a whim. The detective is hired by the rich kids parents to follow rich kid around and see what he is doing. The rich kid mugs the detective and steals his gun, which he hides behind some of his roommate's books in his apartment.
    The professor kicks the student out of school because he is too smart for his own good. The student packs up his books to sell before returning home and discovers the gun. He follows the professor home intending to destroy some bit of foolish public sculpture the professor has set up next to his house. He shoots the gun at the sculpture, the bullet ricochets and hits the professor in the butt.
    Senior police officer stops by rich kid's parent's house to talk to them, because rich kid has been bragging about killing the owner of the soccer team. The police don't really suspect him because the same gun was used to shoot the professor and the team owner had lots of enemies, so a loud mouth kid doesn't really fit their profile of the killer. The kid comes home while senior police officer is there and has an argument with the housekeeper.
    The celebrity chef has had a disastrous public appearance and goes out slumming, incognito, looking for drugs to alleviate his misery. He runs into college student who is down in the dumps now that he has not only been kicked out of school, but the police are probably looking for him. The student feigning drunkenness, falls into Mr. Chef, relieves him of his wallet and replaces it with the pistol. The chef, failing to score any drugs freaks out and decides to alter his appearance by getting his head shaved, whereupon he discovers his wallet it missing. Suddenly finding himself in desperate circumstances he takes a job as a cook at an Italian restaurant where is confined to the kitchen with a 90 year old grandmother who screeches orders incessantly.
    Coincidentally, our senior police officer is having dinner at this same restaurant with one of the local cops, and likewise, college student is also there having dinner with his girlfriend. College student has brought a bag of rich kid's clothes because rich kid believes he needs to lie low for a while due to the perceived heat on him.
    Celebrity chef is enlisted to help serve a large group celebrating a little girl's birthday. Talking to the birthday girl prompts him to break into song, which is apparently his one real talent, which gets a big round of applause from the patrons. Heading back to the kitchen he is threatened by rich kid throwing plates of food in his direction. Taking the pistol from his pocket, he walks rich kid out the front door where he stumbles. Rich kid takes advantage of the situation and grabs the gun, and so when the cops show up two minutes later they find the killer holding the murder weapon.
    Celebrity chef's career is going down in flames thanks to the earlier debacle, until his long suffering publicist uses the impromptu concert to give it a huge boost.
    Our incompetent private detective attempts to claim a reward for information leading to the arrest of the soccer team owner's killer, but the police detain him because he had his name engraved on the gun.

    The women is this story also have important roles to play, but they are embellishments, i.e. they don't get to actually handle the gun.
    Not knowing much about this author, or any others for that matter, I was a little confused by the author's description of the professor. I couldn't figure out whether he was describing himself or some other famous dude. One reviewer claimed it was Umberto Eco.
    The title can be taken as a phrase, as in I'm going "back to Bologna", which is where the story is set, or as the 'title' one would find on a volume of an encyclopedia, i.e. entries from 'Back' to 'Bologna', kind of like 'Happy to Hug'.

April 2016 added Amazon link.

Mopar in the Desert!

1967 Plymouth VIP 2-Door, V8, Auto, VIN:PP23F74266322

CHARLES KEE COLLECTION - DAY 1 
9AM - THURSDAY - MAY 8
Preview 8-4pm, Tuesday & Wednesday, May 6 & 7
55655 Coffey Rd
Highway 20, Brothers, OR 97712

What we have here is a whole bunch of cars laid out in sparse rows in the middle of nothin'. I mean really nothin'. Nothin' as far as the eye can see. I don't think I've ever seen so much nothin'.
   Some of the cars look like beaters, but some, like the one above, look pretty nice. 

Via Posthip Scott.

Virtual Mother's Day

The Fixx - One Thing Leads To Another - 1983
The whole mad damily went to the Irving Street Kitchen on Sunday for brunch to celebrate Mother's Day. Yes, it was a week early, but the way things get jammed up on holidays we decided we should get our celebrating done early. Dutiful daughter took the initiative and got us booked in on a day when we might be able to have a meal in a timely manner.
    I suspect it's very trendy. It all looks brand new, except all the authentically old stuff they use in furnishing the place. They seated the five of us in a booth with burlap curtains hanging from an iron pipe curtain rod. The table looked to be a two inch slab of maple cut from five foot diameter tree.. It was very loud. I noticed this song playing and I thought this-isn't-my-father's kind of place. I guess it was okay with the kids, but only because it was the middle of the day. I didn't mention that this song was older than they are, not that they would have cared. At the time I didn't know just how old this song is.
    The food was fine, though a little light on meat in the breakfast department, but then meat costs money, so it's probably just as well. The tab was a little warm - $100 for the five of us - but not bad for downtown trendy on Sunday, and some of us were drinking.

CodinGame

 

CodinGame Results

There was another coding contest today. I did a little better than last time. This time I came in at #231. Better, but I still didn't manage to pass all the tests.
    The problem involves stopping a tribble from escaping. We have a maze with multiple exits. You can block as many exits as you want, but while you are doing that the tribble is on the move, so you need to figure out which exits are closer and close them first. The tribble is naturally psychic and so knows the quickest route to any and all of the exits.
    For the first set of tests this was sufficient. With the second set of trials things got a little dicier. Seems there are spots in the maze that have two exits, so if the tribble manages to get to one of these spots, you lose. You can block one of the exits, but while you are doing that the tribble has gotten out the other one, so you need to keep the tribble from getting to one of these spots, which means looking ahead.
    It took me a while to recognize what the problem was, and a while longer to come up with a plan to handle it, and by that time I was out of time.
    My general plan was to:

1. Count the number of exits attached to each point. It might be zero, one, two, or more.
2. Maintain my original plan: see if there are any exits adjacent to the tribble's current position and if so block it. If there is more than one exit, give up. You've already lost.
3. If we are safe for the moment we need to look ahead. Starting from the tribble's current location, go to each of the adjacent locations and see how many exits they connect to. If you have one that has more than one, then you need to block the tribble from getting to that point.

I think that would probably have been sufficient for this contest. The problem could be made much worse by having multiple paths to points that lead to multiple exits. On one hand it's kind of tempting to try out each and every path through the maze to see which ones you might need to block and which ones you can ignore, but for even a medium size maze that approach could quickly consume all of your resources.
    So I'm thinking you need to cast a gradually widening net. Since we have already counted the number of exits at each point, we know how far afield we have to go. If there is only one exit, then we only need to look at adjacent points. That was the situation in the first test. If the maximum number of exits is two, then you only need to look at your adjacent locations. If the maximum is higher, than you will need to search farther. A list of locations you have visited could prevent you from going in circles. Simply clear it at the start of each search, and mark off each node as you visit it. Recursion might be the answer if going farther than two links away.