So it was two days after Christmas, and my aunt was taking Kate and me around Gainesville to see and do stuff. Before lunch, she took us to her work at No More Homeless Pets, which shares a facility with a couple of similar organizations. We passed by a room with some kittens in cages.

I would have been content with just looking at the kittens, but Kate wanted to go into the room with them. So, we went into the room. Then she wanted to hold one of the kittens, so my aunt opened one of the cages and let her pick one. Then she wanted to hold all of the kittens, so she picked up each one in turn. Also, I ended up holding some of them.

Later, we went to the bat houses on the UF campus to watch the bats fly out at dusk. Except we were really early for that, so we first checked out the nearby Baughman Center and watched the gators swimming around in Lake Alice. We also took a brief detour to my old apartment building because Kate wanted to see it. Having visited me there during her first three trips to the US, she had a rosier overall image of the place than I did. When she wasn’t there, I would spend most of my time avoiding strange roommates, eating pizza by myself, killing fleas, and not cleaning anything.

The next day, we set off for South Florida. My dad took the day off from work to drive us to Lakeland, and we took Amtrak the rest of the way. I had only taken Amtrak once before—namely, the express service between DC and Orlando for you and your car—so I didn’t have much of an impression of how it was. I knew that in Europe, you get assigned a seat when you buy a ticket. In the USA, or at least in Lakeland, they tell you where to sit when you get on the train, and they group you together by destination. They also write your destination on a piece of paper and stick it above your seat. It’s shameful.

It was time for a late lunch, so Kate and I went to the dining car. We lingered there for quite a while, and when we came back, some other people had been given our seats, so we had to find some other seats that were empty (though maybe they belonged to someone who was in the lounge car or whatever). Finally, we arrived in familiar old South Florida. I hadn’t been there in almost a year and a half.

Since none of my friends nor anyone on CouchSurfing could put us up, we fell back on the Passport Service. Count that as a perk of being an Esperantist; I was this close to dropping $400 on a hotel. So this Esperantist picked us up from the station and introduced us to his husband. We spoke Esperanto with each other, even as we went out for dinner at a pizza place. I hadn’t spoken it in a while, but it came rather easily.

The following day, Kate and I had a late lunch with my friends Nick and TJ. We went to this place on the beach that Kate had a Groupon for. It was nice to catch up with them. I wanted to spend more time with them, but they had to split because they both had to work that night. So Kate and I hung out on the beach for a little while, and then I called up my friend Kevin and asked if he wanted to hang out. He picked us up, and we went to take a stroll in downtown Fort Lauderdale.

None of us had ever been on the Water Taxi before, so flagged down one of their boats from the banks of the New River and rode the entire route, down the river, up the Intracoastal, and back. On the way, we got to see a lot of rich people’s huge houses, still decorated for Christmas, and unfamiliar views of familiar bridges and buildings. I’m very glad that we did it. It stops near some convenient places, like Las Olas Boulevard, and once you have a ticket, you can use it to get on and off for the rest of the day. Protip: tickets are $10 per person after 5 PM.

Possibly related link: Why Do Russians Smile So Seldom? For what it’s worth, I think Kate is smilier than the average Russian.

I could have added to my recent lament (and I could have sworn I did) that the US is woefully locked in to a two-party system that offers us little real choice. It’s one cog of the machine in which corporations buy politicians and get favorable laws out of them. I’ve at times been tempted to support third-party candidates, but it seems hopeless: Voting for your favorite third-party candidate means not voting for your preferred major-party candidate, which helps your less preferred major-party candidate cruise to victory. It’s called the spoiler effect, and if you want to avoid it, you have to vote dishonestly. I’ve always accepted this as a sad reality of life.

But it doesn’t have to be so. Your vote doesn’t have to consist of picking a single candidate to the exclusion of all others. I’ve just found out about a system of voting called range voting. In range voting, a voter ranks the candidates on a numeric scale according to preference (say, 0 to 10), and the candidate most preferred by voters—the one with the highest average score—wins. This allows voters to express various levels of support for various candidates, eliminating both the spoiler effect and dishonest voting. With range voting, third-party candidates could get enough support to level the playing field without “stealing” votes that could cause one major-party candidate to lose to the other. Everyone wins, if you will.

There’s a related system called approval voting. Approval voting essentially takes the system we have now and makes it multiple choice: You can select (approve) more than one candidate, and the candidate approved by the greatest number of voters is the winner. In fact, approval voting can be thought of as range voting where the scale consists only of 0 and 1. The advantage over range voting is that it’s extremely simple, but it doesn’t allow voters to express their preferences as clearly and may not be as beneficial to third parties.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be very much interest in either of these systems. Although several organizations have used approval voting (including the United Nations and IEEE), it’s just not very well-known, and the main source of information about range voting seems to be a poorly designed website by the mathematician who developed it.

No voting system is perfect (otherwise there probably wouldn’t be a whole branch of mathematics dedicated to them), but range voting and approval voting sound much better than anything else I’ve ever heard of. I would really like to help out an organization that supports one or both, but the Center for Election Science (which supports approval voting) and the Center for Range Voting both seem to be tiny groups with little or no momentum; the latter, whose website is the poorly-designed one I linked to above, seems to consist of that one mathematician. (And actually, I just noticed that he’s the president of the former as well.) Meanwhile, FairVote, which advocates the apparently flawed system known as instant-runoff voting, has actual support and a spiffier name.

I’m now imagining myself spearheading an initiative for local elections to use approval or range voting. It would be pretty cool to make a difference like that. But if it’s even possible, it would be extremely tiring and expensive: Seattle is one of the most populous cities in the United States, so I’d need quite a bit of help. I’m not sure, but it might even be necessary to change state law to allow approval or range voting. So, semi-jokingly, I ask: Who’s with me? And a little more seriously, I ask: How could I start?

BBC readers complain about annoying Americanisms. A lot of them sound perfectly normal and correct to me, but I’ve never heard of others. And of course, some of them are genuinely annoying.

The original Cinerama films were shot with three cameras side-by-side and played back with three projectors onto a huge, curved screen. It’s supposed to create the illusion that you’re in the picture. Unfortunately, very few movies were produced this way. Most of them were documentaries and other proof-of-concept films. One of the very, very few that wasn’t was How the West Was Won.

I had never been to the local Cinerama, even for a regular movie, so I figured I’d go there on Friday for the kickoff of the film festival, a screening of How the West Was Won in its original format. All I can say is wow. This film was a massive undertaking all around. Big stars, an epic story, and to see it in Cinerama is really engaging experience, even 49 years later. (Besides the lifelike picture, the film had surround sound. Not bad for a time when most records were in mono.)

Last night was a showing of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and yes, I totally went to it. I thought I would beat everyone out by showing up 40 minutes early, but there was already a huge line. I had pre-ordered a ticket, so it wasn’t a big deal, but I was still surprised by the sheer number of people who wanted to get there early.

I had only ever seen the movie from the comfort of my own home, so watching it on the big screen was different. For one thing, the hugeness of the picture and loudness of the sound made everything more dramatic. I found myself getting tense at certain moments even though I knew what was going to happen. Also, it was interesting to hear a whole audience’s reaction to the movie blow-by-blow. For example, people tend to think HAL’s dialog is funny.

The film festival continues with more showings of those and other movies, so I have some time to decide if I want to see them again. Here’s the whole schedule if you’re interested. Please tell me what amazing movie I should see and then hate me when I tell you I’ve never seen it.

Test Your Vocab in a matter of moments. Mine is estimated at 25,000 words.

I’m a light sleeper. It often takes me a long time to get to sleep, and I wake up easily. When I was in high school, I didn’t need an alarm clock; my mom would wake me up. Usually, it was as simple as opening my door.

For college, I got a cool-looking alarm clock without worrying about how it might sound. It turned out to be loud. Over the course of four years, this started to get annoying. I would naturally wake up way before my alarm was due to go off, presumably because I subconsciously (and consciously) didn’t want to be scared awake. I also always had to peek at the clock to make sure I hadn’t overslept—the power could have gone out—but, of course, that was never actually the case. So I’d be left trying to get back to sleep, which was usually futile. That’s a bad way to start the day.

It probably sounds kind of dumb, but it was only last week that I finally got fed up with this and figured out how to keep it from happening. I remembered that when I was a kid, I had a clock radio. I rarely needed an alarm clock back then (as far as I can remember), but when I did, I woke up pretty pleasantly because the radio would come on instead of some horrific digital squawking. So, I went on Amazon, did some research, and bought a Sony ICF-C318 clock radio. I’ll review it here in case anyone is interested.

Pros:

• Battery backup. No need to wonder if the power went out!
• The time and date are set at the factory; I only had to adjust the time by a few minutes.
• Daylight Saving Time adjustments are made automatically (or manually if necessary).
• When you turn off the alarm, it will automatically come on at the same time the next day. (My old alarm clock wasn’t like that; you always had to remember to set the alarm before going to bed. With this one, you only need to disable the alarm on Friday morning and re-enable it on Sunday night (or whenever.)
• When you do enable the alarm, the alarm time is shown briefly on the display. (With my old clock, I can’t remember how many times I had to double-check this. I can be pretty paranoid.)
• Controls are intuitive, and the whole thing seems well-built.

There are a few cons:

• It won’t show the day of the week. I will miss that about my old clock (again, paranoia: “It’s not Saturday, right?”)
• The display is dim, even at its brightest setting. Not a problem in the dark, but during the day, it’s hard to read.

Overall, I like it, and I believe I made a good choice. Now that I have soft classical music to wake me up and no fear of power outages, I really have no reason to wake up before it’s necessary. So when I do, I try my hardest to keep my eyes closed and go back to sleep. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to sleep a little more soundly.

Generate hipster-flavored dummy text: Hipster Ipsum.

For one of my classes, I’m writing a program that writes limericks. It references a pronunciation dictionary to find sets of rhyming words and a collection of newspaper articles (apparently from the 1950s) to put words in a random but plausible order. The program doesn’t really have a sense of meter yet. If it comes up with something that actually vaguely makes sense, it’s just a coincidence because each line is written independently of the others.

Here’s a selection:

Her polo grounds is cheap
And grand champion 4-h sheep
Last night at noon
Agreements calls soon
Only marvel at a 2-inch deep

And city fashion show at bat
The streets and miss pat
A baseball writers’
In cigaret lighters
Agree on the byer-rolnick hat

New president also could have rated
The question of dimes and waited
Because the 10-hour daily
Ex-mrs. bud daley
It appeared to end a feted

In right center and down
Like that 60,000 old towne
Katanga and beads
He avidly reads
Schools and conservative barriers around

Break the farm income is known
President eisenhower administration and aaron cohn
Grow up pops
A small shops
150,000,000 would not the phone

Here from 1951 through a wreck
The bills of texas tech
The rev. mr. werner
Mrs. h. merner
Aggies got a 17-1/2-inch neck

Bring the united states to send
A way of communist north bend
1954 but it took
The 21st and cooke
Camera in what this would lend

1956 but also admitted killing
People are having a tilling
To his hands
Before 5777 fans
Is aiding them with caramel filling

Can’t afford the main dining
Bill which actually owns and mining
A zinc mine
Is asking the fine
And 7 last year after signing

And sons and dave mills
Bill was reached the bill’s
The arithmetical sum
Was the rum
For months ending in beverly hills

Was and out a peak
Away the prospect of chic
He made the nuns
Library and submachine guns
To a whopping 8% next week

Photographs that show the value of a dollar.

A long, long time ago, there were no clouds residing in the sky as we know it today. There were, however, two Proprietary Kings of the Sky. The sky was leased to them by the federal government, who had acquired it as a result of a lawsuit against the government of Monaco, where it had once served as their vast realm.

The names of the two Kings, in order of the letters of the alphabet, were Arrogance and Stupidity. They were arrogant and stupid.

One bouncy day, the messenger, Stusut, came to the Sky Kingdom of the Sky bearing a message. His message, presented as a singing telegram, was a warning issued by the Scared Cult of the Church of the Fools on the Hill, Inc. It declared to the arrogant and stupid Kings that their contract of lease to the great sky would be interrupted if the President of the United States of A. did not approvingly approve of their charter.

Upon hearing this news, Stupidity shoutingly exclaimed, “What hath God wrought?!”

Upon hearing this exclamatory exclamation, Arrogance answered, “It’s the end of the world as we know it. And in the end, the love thou doth take is approximately equal to 3.1416.”

Confused by this bout [of] confusion, the messenger Stusut asked what they could say in reply to the Scared Cult of the Church of Fools on the Hill, Inc., begging Mr. Prez for acceptance of their Presidential charter. Because of slow communication by messenger in those days, they opted to choose to use e-mail instead.

Now in those days there was a Web site on the Web called thescaredcultofthechurchoffoolsonthehillinc.net, for the address of the .com extension was already taken. From this site, Arrogance and Stupidity sent a piece of electronic mail to the President begging him to keep them as the Proprietary Kings of the Sky. Prez had an e-mail address there, for he was a cult member of the cult.

Days passed, weeks, months, and even a few hours. Finally, there came a reply. The reply said to them that Prez would accept their rulership for another six (6) years under one condition. Arrogance and Stupidity would have to perform servile labor at the local Bucks of Star (a coffee shop, that is).

As all good Sky Kings do, they headed on foot the local Bucks of Star in their locality. Stupidity was pouring a cup of coffee when the messenger Stusut arrived, proclaiming Prez’s warning: “Should thou screw up on this job of servile labor, bad stuff will happen.” It was in listening to this message that Stupidity’s cup runneth over, resulting in a large fire. The Sky Kingdom of the Sky burnt to the ground, leaving but clouds of smoke as a misfortunate reminder. End.

Our first stop was the lighthouse, a short ride away. This would be our second visit to a lighthouse; we had visited the Hillsboro Inlet lighthouse in January. I couldn’t help but compare the two lighthouses. Most notably, the Hillsboro lighthouse is only open to visitors a few days per year, while the St. Augustine lighthouse is only not open to visitors a few days per year. The former is still owned and operated by the US Coast Guard, while the latter is not.

The St. Augustine lighthouse is also more impressive overall. It’s taller, and it has that classic conical lighthouse shape. We spent a while at the top of the lighthouse even though there were a lot of other people there. It was a nice day, and the breeze was strong but refreshing. After going back down, we checked out the adjacent museum and, of course, signed the guestbook.

Kate had wanted to go to the beach, so the next stop on our bicycle journey was Anastasia State Park. At the park, we ate some overpriced hamburgers and then went to the beach. It was a very wide beach with shallow water. After briefly going into the water, we decided to lie in the sun. I had grabbed a couple of towels from for us our host’s bathroom (with his permission, of course), and I unraveled mine to find that half of it was labeled “FACE” and the other half was labeled “BUTT.” Kate thought it was hilarious.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s putting on sunscreen. It’s greasy and smelly and makes a mess. So I didn’t put on any sunscreen, and neither did Kate. Instead, we just lay. After a while, we were incredibly sunburned, and we decided to go back to our host’s to relax. But a short stay turned into a long one, and by the time we went out on our bikes again it was getting dark.

I wanted to take Kate to see the scenic campus of Flagler College, so that’s where we went. We spent a lot of time taking photos of the buildings (especially Kate, with her new camera) and then just talking. We were tired, having had a long couple of days. And it was pretty quiet, with only the occasional horse and buggy going by with an annoying tour guide and some family inside.

After a while, I thought we should head back; I didn’t want to be out too late. At our host’s place, Kate and I had some frozen dinners that we had bought at the grocery store. Not long after, we laid our sore, sunburned selves down to sleep.

Read about The Origins of 10 Nicknames. (Via The Presurfer)

Really interesting: Top 10 Codes You Aren’t Meant To Know. I’ll never think of stores the same way again. (Via J-Walk Blog)

I felt terrible. The day before that, I had told her that I wanted us to be just friends. And since she would be coming to visit in less than a month, I didn’t know how she was going to feel about me. I really wasn’t sure whether we would have a good time at all. It was bad timing on my part, but is there ever a right time for that?

I started to read the book. It was a really large book, and I was worried that I wouldn’t finish it before she got here. But I read a little bit every day on the bus to and from class. At first I wasn’t sure how interested I would be in it, since it seemed to be just some guy’s life story. But it got more interesting, and I started chugging along.

Kate flew in to Miami on August 1 and spent the week making her way up through Florida. During that time, we texted each other with details of what we had been up to, and she told me how much she missed me. I was sorry. I missed her too. It hurts me to even think about what I said to her and how she must have felt.

I still hadn’t gotten close to finishing the book on Saturday, August 7, when Andy and I went to the Greyhound bus station to pick up Kate. This was where I had last seen her over six months ago. We (or, at least, I) had gotten emotional because I didn’t know when we would see each other again.

The bus arrived late, so I killed some time by reading the book. Finally, Kate’s bus arrived. She stepped off the bus, and Andy and I greeted her in Esperanto, the language we usually used with her. Soon she asked if we could switch to English, so English it was.

Before she arrived, she had asked us to take her out to lunch somewhere, and she wanted it to be a surprise. Andy and I had decided on Merlion, the quiet Singaporean restaurant where he had taken me after our abortive attempt to watch a Fourth of July firework show. It was quiet there indeed, but as we slowly worked away at our dishes, the place got more and more crowded—too crowded for the staff to handle.

It was a graduation day, and a number of people had decided to make Merlion the place to celebrate. Each of us tried the others’ dishes. With her dish, Kate got the “communist soup” (meat, potatoes, and not much else). Our waitress was busy with who knows how many tables, but eventually, she gave us the check.

It was already getting late, but Kate said that she wanted to go to the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens, so Andy dropped us off there and went home to take a nap. I had never been to the gardens before, so it was new for me too. The weather was getting terrible by this time, and it looked like it was going to start pouring rain any second. But we decided to set out and wander on (and sometimes off) the path, admiring the various plants all around.

Toward the end of our visit, not long before Andy was going to come back and pick us up, Kate asked if I was going to hold her hand. I did, and I felt more comfortable, like everything was right with the world again. We walked to a small gazebo and watched a fake waterfall for a little while. Then we headed back to the front of the park, where Andy was waiting to pick us up.

We got back to the apartment, where Andy had written (and I had helped sign) a greeting to Kate in Russian. She got a big kick out of it. Later, Kate and I watched Kurt Cobain About a Son on her computer. Soon after, it was night. It was a wonderful night.

And now, the links:

Icons of the Web is a huge graphic showing the favicons for a few hundred thousand of the most popular sites on the Internet. The size of each site’s icon is proportional to the site’s popularity. Yes, theworldofstuff.com is there—it’s one of the smallest icons, but it’s there.

The BBC talks to some guys who make cheesy knock-offs of popular movies.

And today it’s my 21st birthday. I went to work in the morning, and now I’m taking a quick break from studying for the Operating Systems exam I have tonight. Yes, when I decided to take summer classes, I expected that I would have class on my birthday, but the reality was far worse. After the exam, I’m going out to dinner with a couple of friends. And after that, I have to do Operating Systems homework, which I’ll probably have to pull an all-nighter to finish. Yay…

(I know, I know, I have to update my age on the sidebar and the bio and everything. It’s not like I forgot, but I’m really, really, really, really, really, really, really busy.)

This link goes out to all my friends who misspell “a lot”: The Alot Is Better Than You at Everything.

On Monday morning, I attended the closing ceremony of the conference. Well, there wasn’t much ceremony; the term used in Esperanto means “solemn closing.” It wasn’t especially solemn either. It was mainly a series of closing remarks, capped off with a singing of “La Espero.”

The organizers of the convention presented some statistics, most notably that the attendance was over 100. The president of Esperanto-USA gave some details about the next national convention, which will be held at the University of California, Berkeley, in early June 2011, and the one after that, which will be held in north Texas in 2012.

I was the only college-age kid to attend the closing ceremony. Once that was over, I rejoined the others in the lobby. Andy, Darcy, and I got to talking about exciting it was to be with so many other young Esperantists and how to keep the energy going. For a while, Esperanto-USA had had an active youth branch called USEJ. We decided bring USEJ back to life by starting up an IRC channel where we could constantly chat with each other and by having regular voice chats online. We also decided to look into the possibility of having a national youth congress in South Florida in the winter.

I’ve come back energized, and I’ve come back with a goal. I want to take new Esperantists with me to Berkeley next year. That means Andy and I will have to work hard to attract new members to our club and help them learn Esperanto, but it’s a worthwhile challenge.

I didn’t actually go to DC at all during the trip, even on the drive to the train station. Yes, instead of flying back to Florida, we took the Auto Train with Andy’s dad and Andy’s dad’s car, which Andy is now using. It was actually pretty comfortable, and I even expected to sleep at one point. I don’t think I actually did; I should have known better. But the complementary dinner and breakfast were pretty good, and it was fun to see “America at see level” (Amtrak’s former or maybe current tagline).

We arrived in Sanford, Florida, on Tuesday morning, and we drove to Gainesville. As soon as we made it to UF, I raced into my public speaking class, which was already in progress. I was going to have to deliver an impromptu speech. We had each submitted a quotation, and then when it was our turn to give a speech, we had to pick one of them at random and and deliver a speech about our reaction to it.

For some reason, there weren’t as many quotes as there were people, and I was the last to go, so I was left with none. The teacher asked people to submit some more, so I had fresh pickin’s. I chose:

“We are not here merely to make a living, we are here to enrich the world.”
—Woodrow Wilson

Within three minutes, I explained a little bit about what Esperanto is all about and about the experience I had had with other Esperantists over the long weekend. I tied it all together by explaining the shared hope that Esperanto can help enrich the world. I got a strong round of applause, and people had more questions for me after the speech. I got a 98% on the assignment.

With Congress.org’s MegaVote, you can sign up for weekly e-mails with information on how your representatives are voting. Good idea! (Via HackCollege)

I had no idea Google allowed you to purchase advertising time on TV, but someone at Slate tried it out. (Via waxy.org)

You know what’s cool? Science. You know what’s cooler? Infographics that aren’t totally stupid and help you understand science. Here’s one that organizes popular health supplements by the amount of evidence for their effectiveness. (Via Lifehacker)