A Failure To Add Up

It's not often I can say something positive about the Coalition, so I would like to take a moment and congratulation on their new education idea. For far too long naysayers have gotten away with insisting that best teaching practice might somehow be tied to irrelevant factors such as "culture" and "school-day length" and "holiday times" and "language", but finally some brave soul has taken a stand and announced in a clear voice: Chinese teaching methods must work better in England than English teaching methods, because they work better in China!

I eagerly await further announcements that Australians will be flown in to teach our sportsmen how to play in the sun more often, Paraguay military officials will be brought over to demonstrate how to defend a country without any naval units at all, and cheetahs will be employed to teach children to run faster by eating only raw wildebeest.

(Actually, all snark aside, I'm all in favour of sharing best practice across national borders. The problem here isn't the initiative, it's the ridiculously grandiose claims being made about its aims.)

One Third Of The Way To A Blog That Can Drink And Watch Porn

Somehow it has been six full years since this particular vertex of the blogohedron was founded.  My thanks to everyone who's taken time out of their lives to comment here, or just to read what tumbles from my head.  It's been five years since I put up the hit counter, and I'm more than happy that I hit 60 000 views over that time.

The Madness Of The King

 The King in Yellow is forbidden. And with good reason.  There are only two responses a mind can have upon reading the work: it can be lost to despair, or it can be lost to madness.

Obviously, there is no way for us to understand exactly how the play wreaks its havoc; we can only speculate from the rambling, turbulent writings of those poor souls who have exposed themselves.  Some, like Lange, speak of Lost Carcosa, an ancient city on some other world.  Others talk of the Lake of Hali, or of the King in Yellow (who may or may not be named Hastur), a being so ill-defined some believe it has no fixed form to begin with. Some or all of this may reside in the star system of Aldebaran, or perhaps that star has relevance here in some other way.  As I say, we cannot ever truly know.

But in a sense, it doesn't matter.  Some say there exists a formless monster named Hastur in the Lake of Hali on a barren planet orbiting Aldebaran, who has dictated a play that will drive you insane.  It doesn't actually matter whether or not this is correct.  It doesn't even matter if the play itself is real.  All that matters is that the madmen believe it.  They believe Hastur - a name we might as well apply to the phenomenon as the being, whatever it is or might be - has driven them mad.  And mad they most certainly are.  Which means that Hastur is real whether he is real or not.

Especially when we consider just how far the King's influence actually spreads.  It's not just those who find the play itself who succumb, after all.  What better way is there to understand Hart and Cohle than to realise both are standing on a knife's edge; both are angels of the King no less surely than was Dora. With madness and despair the only two futures into which they can fall, they find themselves tangled up in both. For Hart, his despair lies in the feedback loop he has trapped himself within - his family not enough for him he's begun a torrid affair, but the more comfort he finds there the further his family drifts from him, and the more he needs his lover Lisa. This both results in a widening gyre of despair and the obvious and ugly insanity of demanding his wife be more supportive of his obvious failure to support her, and the bitter condemnation of women who he's somehow convinced himself are applying sex in a less moral way than using it to mortify your wife so you can snipe at her for not forgiving you enough.

Meanwhile, Cohle's despair at the loss of his daughter led to him willingly seeking out the madness of drug addiction.  With mixed success, it would seem. If one seeks to hide from the vicious, elemental nature of the world, finding a way to "mainline the truth of the universe" would have to be considered a failure.  But then this is the difference between Hart and Cohle.  Hart is spinning into chaos.  Cohle is orbiting it, tracing the very edge of the eye of the storm. 

Because what other option is there?  Cohle's admission that he sometimes feels grateful that his daughter died before she could comprehend the horror of the world or the sins of every parent is impossibly, numbingly bleak, but withstanding the world can require that kind of madness.  The madness of perspective is a poison, but other poisons are worse; we must drip-feed ourselves with one kind to build up our resistance to the others. We must be mad to not go mad.

What other defence can we possibly mount against what is coming?

Z For Fake?

I watched World War Z last night and, since it came under such fire from fans of the original novel, I thought it might be worth sketching out a few points from the perspective of someone with a fair working knowledge of zombie fiction but who hasn't read the source material.

Alas, from this particular vantage point, there's really very little to say about the view.  This is probably the zombie film to date which has had the most money thrown at it, and that money hasn't been wasted exactly, but the effort has clearly gone into spectacle in a way that doesn't particularly seem necessary.  We've seen fast zombies before (in the far superior 28 Days Later and the wonderful Dawn of the Dead remake, to pick the two most successful examples), so whilst the frenetic pace might involve more explosions and helicopters than we're used to, it would be hard to argue these add all that much to the dish.

On the other hand, the sense of scale here is genuinely affecting.  The coming together of various ships on the ocean to create fleets of uninfected might seem an obvious idea, but it gets across the sense of humanity's downfall in a way that other zombie films are only capable of hinting at. The globe-trotting aspect works better than one might assume - the same old undead tricks pasted onto a map of the world gives the carnage a new dimension.  It reminds me of Eldritch Horror as compared to Arkham Horror; the two share a theme, a lot of their artwork, and very similar game mechanics, but trying to get from Australia to the Canadian wilderness to deal with a threat just somehow feels different to heading from Arkham's train station to its southern woods.  It's an illusion, of course, but then what part of film-making isn't?

Besides, with so much of zombie horror concerned with the basics of survival in a world without hope, it's nice to take time out with a film explicitly concerned with considering the big picture, dealing with the plague and trying to reclaim the globe. Purists may find this too optimistic - sneer at this as not a real zombie flick - but that's the problem with purists; ultimately reiteration becomes more important than imagination.

(Spoilers below the fold)

A Tale Of Cocktails: Facts, We Haz Them

Been a while since we did this, so let's take another stupidly long look at the various ways I've been showing my exocrine system who's boss.

Lists

11 Best Cocktails

1. Brain Hemorrhage
2. Flying Grasshopper
3. Woo Woo
4. Fuzzy Shark
5. Choc Berry
=6. Baby Guinness
=6. Dennis the Menace
8. Sugarific Ciderific
=9. Malibu Pop
=9. Daiquiri

5 Worst Cocktails

1. Screwdriver
2. Champagne Cocktail
3. Orange Blossom
4. Tomorrow We Sail
5. Poinsettia Holiday

9 Tastiest Cocktails  

1. Woo Woo
=2. Flying Grasshopper
=2. Midori Sour
=2. Choc Berry
=2. After Six
=2. Baby Guinness
=2. Brain Hemorrhage
=2. Mudslide
=2. Malibu Pop  

Worst Tasting Cocktail

Screwdriver  

6 Prettiest Cocktails  

1. Brain Hemorrhage
=2. Metropolitan  
=2. Midori Sour
=2. Choc Berry
=2. Fuzzy Shark
=2. Baby Guinness  

Ugliest Cocktail

Snowball  

11 Cheapest Cocktails  

= Caribbean Milk
= Ciderific
= Sugarific Ciderific
= Screwdriver
= Daiquiri
= Raspberry Tipple Plus
= More Sunshine
= Dribena
= Fuzzy Shark
= Fuzzy Navel
= Snowball  

Most Expensive Cocktail

  Mudslide  

8 Best Named Cocktails  

=1. Woo Woo
=1. Brain Hemorrhage
=2. Flying Grasshopper
=2. Metropolitan
=2. Daiquiri
=2. Choc Berry
=2. Fuzzy Shark
=2. French 75

2 Worst Named Cocktails  

= Tomorrow We Sail
= Champagne Cocktail  

12 Easiest Cocktails  

=1. Elderflower Royale 
=1. Kir Imperial
=3. Sex on the Beach
=3. Flying Grasshopper
=3. Dribena
=3. Black Forest
=3. Ume Royale
=3. Kir Royale
=3. Blue Lagoon
=3. Baby Guinness
=3. Brain Hemorrhage
=3. Mimosa  

Most Fiddly Cocktail  

Mudslide

11 Strongest Cocktails  

1. Flying Grasshopper
=2. Baileys Cookie Martini
=2. Caipirinha
=2. White Lady
=3. Brain Hemorrhage
=3. Mudslide
=5. After Six
=5. Dennis The Menace
=5. Baby Guinness
=5. Malibu Pop
=5. Champagne Cocktail

Weakest Cocktail

Choc Berry

Supplies Consumed

Booze

Advocaat
Amaretto
Blue Curacao
Brandy
Cachaca
Chambord
Champagne
Cherry wine
Chocolate liqueur
Cider
Creme de Cacao
Creme de Cassis
Creme de Menthe
Elderflower liqueur
Gin
Irish Cream (Baileys)
Kahlua
Malibu
Midori
Peach Schnapps
Plum wine
Port
Rum (dark)
Rum (white)
Sloe gin
Tia Maria
Triple Sec
Vodka (standard)
Vodka (vanilla)

Mixers

Bitters
Cocoa
Cranberry juice
Cream
Grenadine
Lemon juice
Lemonade
Lime cordial
Lime juice
Milk
Orange juice
Pineapple juice
Sugar
Sugar syrup
Tonic water
Vanilla syrup

Garnish

Blackberry
Caster sugar
Cherry
Chocolate
Cookie
Cranberries
Lemon
Marshmallow
Mint Matchmaker
Orange slice
Orange peel
Whipped cream
A shark

Glasses

Champagne
Cocktail
Collins
Cordial
Highball
Shot

Estimated amount of ice used: 768 cubic centimetres.

Statistics

Mean cocktail score: 6.75

Standard deviation of cocktail score: 0.777

Range of scores: 4.2

Last time around we demonstrated a rough normal distribution of the cocktail scores.  But that was just lazily eyeballing the QQ plot.  This time let's get serious and run them through a Shapiro-Wilks test, the result of which is a p-value of 0.099.  Whew!

With that done, we can fit a linear regression, with the overall scores as output and the various booze types as the covariates.  This way we may be able to detect what ingredients have a significant effect upon my enjoyment or otherwise of mixed drinks.  45 cocktails is admittedly a fairly small sample size to subject to a linear analysis, particularly with so many covariates, but we'll see what happens.

Eventually we'll want to consider combinations of drinks, but for now lets work through each booze type separately.  The first number is the  p-value; a p-value of 0.05 or less can be (tentatively) be considered significant (in layman's terms; it looks like the ingredient has an effect on my tastes above what might be accounted for by chance). The attached number tells us the average effect of the booze type upon cocktail score.

(As an example, then, Baileys might look like it has a larger effect on my opinion than champagne - and a positive one, since adding Baileys to a cocktail increases its score by 0.683 on average, but unlike champagne, we cannot say this effect is not down to chance. The reason we can't say that for Baileys even though the apparent effect is larger than that for champagne is that I've had fewer cocktails containing Baileys than including champagne, which makes it harder to pin down the effect.)

Advocaat 0.562 -0.464
Amaretto 0.309 -0.579
Baileys 0.064 0.683
Blue Curacao 0.422 0.300
Brandy 0.058 -1.49
Cachaca 0.651 -0.361 
Champagne 0.027 -0.573
Chambord 0.697 0.161
Cherry Wine 0.651 -0.361
Chocolate Liqueur 0.459 -0.422
Cider 0.258 0.652 
Creme de Cacao 0.043 1.58
Creme de Cassis 0.788 0.154
Creme de Menthe 0.078 0.991
Dark Rum 0.836 -0.086
Elderflower Liqueur 0.272 -0.873
Gin 0.236 -0.408
Kahlua 0.556 0.243
Malibu 0.458 0.278
Midori 0.952 0.048
Peach Schnapps 0.020 0.695
Plum Wine 0.952 0.048
Port 0.174 -1.08
Tia Maria 0.337 0.764
Triple Sec 0.697 0.161
Vanilla Vodka 0.952 0.048
Vodka 0.960 0.014
White Rum 0.483 0.559

So apparently cocktails with creme de cacao or peach Schnapps in them are significantly better, and those with champagne are significantly worse.  Of course, just saying such a thing reveals the problem here: there are plenty of cocktails adding Schnapps to probably cause problems (something involving creme de menthe, for instance, which itself came close to being significant and which apparently adds a full point on to each cocktail into which its placed), and there are some cocktails so hideous that a burst of bubbly would be helpful, if only to dilute the horror.

Ultimately what's really needed here is an analysis of the covariances.  That will have to wait until I've consumed more cocktails before it seems worth doing, however.  To the magic cupboard!

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Quiet Around Here...

...Innit? In large part, that's from struggling to think of anything to say.  The major news story of the day just isn't anything I can sensibly comment on.  I mean, Crimea, dude. Dude? Crimea.

(I suppose though it's a fairly damning commentary that I don't know shit about the Ukraine's problems and I can still tell a significant percentage of US political commentators are two enclaves short of a united Georgia. It is difficult to have hope for a species who watches columnists argue Russia has invaded the Crimea because Obama didn't bomb Syria, and then rewards them with money, rather than beatings and exile.)

I suppose the best thing I can do is to outsource.  Here's the always sensible [1] Daniel Larison with his twelve point plan on how the US can respond to foreign protests without being a worthless punk.  An awful lot of what is contained therein would be worth our own government taking note of - we may not have a Navy strong enough to scare seagulls off of Rockall, but our rhetorical flourishes could perhaps still do with some downsizing.

[1] On foreign policy.  On domestic policy, ever so much not so much.

The Darkness That Comes Before

There is something ancient stirring in Louisiana.

It must be ancient. What else could need a stone-age serial killer in order to take notice?  Not for this being the newly-arrived mumblings of Latin texts.  Slaughtering a sacrifice with steel would be functionally no different to dedicating a death by radiation poisoning - these are methods of death something so achingly old and distant could never understand.

So far removed from our time and comprehension is the stirrer that language itself gets tangled up.  It would be easy to assume it's interest in Erath hails from phonetics; the wrath of beings older than we can imagine descending on a one-horse Southern town to remind us who is and always was in charge.  But I think it's something else. Erath is Earth, viewed through the lens of a being that cannot understand the importance of the letters and the word it forms.  Erath may as well be Earth, just as we may as well be birds, or wasps, or dead.  It's the attempt by something so far beyond us it cannot possibly understand to make its terrible voice heard.

Which is what makes Cohle and Hart so appropriate as investigators here. If what is happening is the reassertion of a primal hierarchy humanity has entirely forgotten - if indeed we are old enough as a species to have intersected with what came before, and somehow survived - then who could be more appropriate to seek out the truth than two men equally deluded. One because he is aware that there are self-aware consciousnesses that far predate and dwarf our own, but who has given it a name and an interest in humanity that is completely incorrect; a comforting face painted on a featureless force of horror.  The other, because his assumption that mankind is the first intelligence to rise beyond the basic rules of nature is born of the same fundamental arrogance: that we can name and study what exists beyond our pathetically minimal perception.  Hart may not understand how Cohle can not be a Christian, his colleagues may mock him for not recognising a Tuttle when he sees one, but if they were to ever take a peek behind the curtain, what they'd learn of real power would, if they were supremely lucky, merely deign to kill them.

And soon the curtain will pull itself back. The memory of the town is fading.  The memory of mankind is fading along with it, and Cohle is simply the first person to taste the psychosphere and figure it out.  We were never writing the story of the world.  We were merely sketching it in pencil, twiddling our thumbs between apocalypses. We all think of destiny as a meaningful conclusion because it is too horrible to consider it might simply be a full stop.

But a full stop is exactly what is arriving. It may take seventeen years, or seventeen decades, but our story is ending. We can make our peace with that, or not.  I suggest we try, though.  Peace will very soon be in short supply.