The Cook of Castamar

The Cook of Castamar - Trailer (Official) | Season 1 | Netflix
MVSRS
It's like a Spanish version of Downton Abbey, but 200 years earlier. We've got lords and ladies, an army of servants and all kinds of intrigue. Right off the bat we know who the good guys are, but it takes the entire season to reveal just how rotten the scoundrels are. It's fine, light entertainment and the production values (i.e. realism) are pretty darn good. There are a couple of people saying things which would realistically have them whipped, but we'll excuse that. Good help is hard to find, you know.

King Felipe V of Spain (1683-1746), by Louis-Michel van Loo, c.1739.

This story takes place during the reign of Philip of Anjou, or more specifically Philip V of Spain (1683 - 1746). 

A breech loading miquelet musket with a reusable cartridge, used by Philip V, made by A. Tienza, Madrid, circa 1715

There is a scene where the lords and ladies go out shooting. Did not see the King's breech loading rifle, but he wasn't there. Hard to believe the ladies would be out shooting, but there is really no explaining why the rich do what they do. 

12 Episodes, 50 minutes each, Netflix

The Mire '97

The Mire '97 - Trailer (Official) | Season 2 | Netflix
MVSRS

Polish murder mystery. We have some of the same characters that were in season 1 along with some new ones, the principle one being the lead detective, a tough chick lesbian from the big city (Krakow or Warsaw, I'm not sure which). Like most of these European cop shows, nobody is telling the truth, they're all lying through their teeth. We get some flashbacks to the end of WW2 when the Russians are coming in. They're running out the Germans, but they are also trampling on the Poles and being pretty brutal about it. Back in the present day, which was 24 years ago (2021 minus 1997), there is a pretty spectacular escape stunt along towards the end, one part skill and ten parts desperation. The guy ends up in the hospital but that's better than the morgue. 

I don't think there were any male homosexuals in this series, which was a plus. They've shown up in just about every other show we've watched recently. I guess it's a fact of life, and probably more common on the fringes of society where most of these crime stories take place. I can tolerate it, but I would just as soon they weren't part of the show. For some reason, the lesbians don't bother me, probably because they were good looking women.

6 Episodes, 50 minutes each, Netflix

Just what you need, a V-16 watch

The Jacob & Co. Bugatti Chiron Baguette Black and Orange Sapphires
Jacob & Co.

On one hand it's totally ridiculous. On the other the design and construction of it kept some very talented people employed for a while. If they weren't gainfully employed, who knows what kind of mischief they might get up to. Also, it's no more ridiculous than the car, which is also totally ridiculous, but they are both kind of cool as examples of what is possible.

Via Ross

Update September 2024 replaced missing video.

Number Jigsaw Puzzle

Completed Puzzle

Dennis gave me this puzzle for my birthday. I spent a few minutes trying to solve it but then realized I could write a computer program to solve it, much like I did for another puzzle he gave me.

It didn't take long to write it, but it took a while to track down the bugs and to polish it up a bit.

Puzzle Pieces

The first problem was how to represent the puzzle pieces in the program. With the cube puzzle, I was able to use a 64-bit integer to represent the 4 x 4 x 4 cube. This puzzle was a little trickier.

Seven Segment Display

The digits here are modeled on the seven segment displays that are common in simple electronic devices. Note that each segment is shaped like a rectangle with a triangular point on each end. If the puzzle pieces closely followed the electronic pattern it would have been simple to encode them as data. However, some of the pieces, like the zero, one and seven, included a bit that isn't part of the original pattern, and some (the zero) were missing a bit. 

Zero

I decided to 'draw' the digits using ASCII characters. Each true segment was represented by three characters. I couldn't come up with a good visual method of representing multiple triangles in one space, so I gave each segment three full spaces and left a space between segments. 

Playing Field

The playing field, like the individual digits, is an array of character strings. Valid places are marked by vertical bars or hyphens. Invalid places are marked with X's and spaces.

Most of the mechanics of the program were pretty straight forward and didn't give me any trouble, but I tried to use a minimal amount of space for the puzzle pieces and that kept biting me. Eventually I realized I needed an extra row of spaces surrounding each character and around the playing field as well and then things started coming together. (It's not that I was trying to save space, 200 bytes isn't going to make any difference in a machine with gigabytes of RAM. I was trying to adhere to the old dictum of 'necessary and sufficient'.)

I let it run for a while and it found multiple solutions, but after a 20 odd hours I said this is enough, shut it down and started looked at just how many combinations I was testing. Pieces can be rotated through four different orientations and can be flipped to make a mirror image. Not all pieces need all four rotations. Turn some pieces (like the two) 180 degrees, and you are back where you started. And for some, the mirror image is identical to the original. So I modified the program to use this information. Now it runs to completion in just over an hour and found 16 possible solutions.

Every solution required at least one piece to be flipped to become its mirror image.

Digit:       0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Solution  1: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0

Solution  2: 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0

Solution  3: 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 0

Solution  4: 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 0

Solution  5: 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Solution  6: 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Solution  7: 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Solution  8: 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Solution  9: 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Solution 10: 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Solution 11: 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Solution 12: 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Solution 13: 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1

Solution 14: 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1

Solution 15: 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 1

Solution 16: 1 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 1

Table showing which digits were flipped

For pieces in a vertical orientation, there are 15 possible positions on the playing field. Pieces lying on their sides have 16 possible positions. Zero is a special case as it is the first piece we play. Any position past the halfway mark can be considered a mirror image of the playing field and so we only have 10 possible positions for the zero (6 in vertical orientation and 4 in horizontal).

This gives a total of 4.3 times 10 to the 18th power possible placements. The program tried approximately 450 million combinations on its way to finding the 16 solutions.

Source code can be found on github.

HBC York Factory

York Factory Tour – Video

I'm reading The Terror by Dan Simmons. About halfway through, the alcoholic Captain Crozier runs out of whiskey and suffers a period of agonizing withdrawal accompanied by some feverish dreams. Some of these dreams have the quality of a clear vision of the near future wherein his wife is berating the Lords of the British Admiralty to organize a search and rescue party to locate the two ships of Captain Crozier's expedition. 

In his imagination he sees they could send a rescue expedition up the MacKenzie River. That would be 'up' as in North as the MacKenzie flows north to the arctic ocean. In the summer time I imagine the river would be water as opposed to ice, so the relief party would be able to 'cruise' down the river to the arctic ocean. However they would still be a thousand miles west of where Captain Crozier's ships are currently frozen in.

The leftmost placemark is the mouth of the MacKenzie River
The center placemark is King William Island where the ships are locked in ice
The lower right placemark is the HBC York Factory

The Terror is a novel, albeit based on historical events, but was the MacKenzie River even a possibility? I do a little digging and I find 

Economic History Theme Study
STEAMBOATS ON THE RIVERS
AND LAKES OF MANITOBA
1859-96 (135 page PDF. I've only read the first few pages.)

and one of the first things that is mentioned is the HBC York Factory. HBC is the Hudson's Bay Company. You knew that, right? I didn't. I really hate it when writers assume everyone knows what their secret acronym stands for. Okay, that's enough whining. Back to our main thread.

York Factory was the HBC trading post on the shore of Hudson Bay. It's still standing. Ron Beck has a good summary of the place. Here's an excerpt:

This York Factory site, was, for over 200 years, the centerpiece, and headquarters in fact, of the most expansive, ambitious and successful business enterprise of its time. Maybe ever. Together with the East India Company of the Dutch (spices, rubber and coffee), the Hudson's Bay Company, "HBC," of the British (furs) dominated 18th and 19th century global commerce. The value of the furs passing through this remote spot, in 2018 US$ has been estimated to be well over $1billion dollars per year. The appetite of European (and US) well-to-do consumers for fur hats and coats in fact drove the opening up of the entire northern parts (Canada and northwestern USA) of North America. The settlements that fur trading created still are in place and the canoe routes still exist today.

I remember hearing about HBC when I was a kid in school. Never really understood just how big and powerful they were until today. Still hasn't sunk in.

 

Puzzles

228 Untitled444

I've added jigsaw puzzles to my solitaire repertoire. I play one or two a day, they take about a half hour each. I limit myself to 150 pieces, more or less. Larger puzzles can take hours. Mostly I've doing landscapes and cars and girls, but then this one showed up and my mind said 'wow'. Total gut reaction, no thinking involved, so I had to go play it. 228 pieces. I started early this morning and finished sometime around noon. I wasn't working on it continuously, I had other things to do like a couple of hours of driving around town and taking a nap and eating breakfast. Still it took a while. Funny that it didn't seem to be any harder than a regular puzzle. I really like this picture, but I can't tell you why. I would never produce something like that. 

All my artwork is pencil sketches on scrap paper. Or computer code. I think it's pretty. It's kind of like building a machine out of metal, you build it to do something. There are lots of ways to build machines. You can build them out of wood, or steel and concrete, or aluminum and plastic. But after you've got the machine working, do you spend any time improving its appearance? 

Lamborghini V-12 Engine

Some people do, and those machines appear at car shows and some even show up in museums. 

Likewise, there are lots of ways of writing code, and I like mine to look a certain way. 4 spaces per tab, tab indents, braces on lines by themselves, no braces unless they are necessary (adding braces around a single statement after an else would require two more lines. Besides, they look stupid. Try to keep lines under 100 characters. The rest of it is too esoteric to describe, or maybe I just don't know how to explain it.

I got my number-jigsaw puzzle program working. I kind of like it. I'm thinking about a post and hope to get it up later today or tomorrow.

Dream Crushed Over Trivial Bullshit Represents Nation Better Than Gold Medal Ever Could

Sha'Carri Richardson, Olympic class sprinter

Sha'Carri Richardson got booted off the US Olympic team after she tested positive for marijuana. Post title says everything that needs to be said, stolen from The Onion.

Via Drug War Rant (change the spacing on that title and you get 'drug warrant').