by Alina Adams

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I’ve been reading and watching a lot of material on figure skating to prepare for seeing the Worlds next week, and this was a pleasant part of that immersion. Alina Adams, a sports television researcher, was approached to do a mystery about the figure skating world. Naturally, the investigator in this PI procedural is Rebecca “Bex” Levy, a TV researcher covering the Nationals. After a controversial ruling, an Italian judge is found dead under suspicious circumstances, and Bex’s loathsome producer is eager to have her deliver the answer in time for the closing gala.

One oddity here is that Murder On Ice doesn’t quite meet the technical requirements of the genre: there is no second body. Nor is it a thriller, because Bex never really leaves her element; she’s an intelligent and (mildly) analytical observer of a sport and a medium for which she feels little affinity, and even when she’s most worried, her concerns are chiefly about losing a job that she doesn’t much like. We have good — even great — books that flutz the formal requirements of the mystery, but I found it odd here because figure skating is so concerned with formal requirements.

The sclerotic idiocy of the American Labor movement will be on full display at the World Figure Skating Championships.

After their favorite skaters perform, some skating fans like to give them stuffed animals. Often, they make or modify these “plushies” for their particular skater. For example, one young woman has designed and sewn a plush Amber Glenn doll for Amber Glenn.

The Boston Garden is prohibiting stuffed animals, citing an agreement with the vendor union. Stuffed animals will instead be sold inside the arena. The unhappy attendees are calling this plushiegate.

Sure, this preserves union jobs — perhaps as much as 1/10 of a minimum-wage job per year.

This is a good way to demonstrate to thousands of young people that unions care only for other people — for people who are older, whiter, and richer. And it’s a good way to demonstrate how Democrats demoralize voters in order to protect unions who turn around and support Trump.

A ten-episode series about figure skating, although it is chiefly about living with bipolar disorder.

I’m going to be spending a lot of time later this month at the World Figure Skating Championships, so I’ve been doing a media diet of skating books, web sites, and films. This is a terrific ten-episode film, made with sense and (some) taste. The writers wanted to avoid the convention in which the star has exclusive narrative rights, and they do a wonderful job of providing separate arcs for the (inevitable) minority sidekick (with a brilliant performance by Amanda Zhou, who shamefully lacks a Wikipedia page), for little sister, for Mom, for everyone. These are not one-episode shifts of focus, like The Bear does, but prolonged arcs. Unfortunately, in the late episodes this forced too much narrative into too little space. Lots of really fine acting, notably the brilliant Kaya Scodelario.

Last weekend, Detlef Beyer hosted a terrific Tinderbox meetup to demonstrate his integration of Tinderbox with a variety of large language models.

The previous day, Detlef had run into a particular JSON reply that crashed Tinderbox when Tinderbox tried to parse it. The problem arise from quoted strings that contained new emoji from Unicode’s Supplementary Multilingual Plane. This is a group of 65,536 potential code points (not all are currently assigned) that represent characters you seldom encounter: cuneiform, Linear A, Mayan numerals, and many recent emoji.

Tinderbox 1 didn’t support Unicode, because Unicode was not then in widespread use. We started to get serious about Unicode in Tinderbox 4, and Tinderbox 6 was already pretty good at Unicode. Unfortunately, that Supplementary Multilingual Plane can cause headaches.

One of the core classes in Tinderbox is Parser, which provides services for parsing actions, parsing export templates, parsing JSON (from Web services) and RIS (from reference managers), and lots of other little chores. My recent(ish) fix moved the internals of Parser to be Unicode-aware. Each parser needs explicitly to adopt the new way of doing things: the parts of the system that predate Unicode also predate test-driven development!

I think it’s time to make sure that everything has in fact adopted the new way. It’s a big refactoring, because it tends to ramify in surprising ways, and also because the New Way changes the architecture significantly. The core problem is that Parser, in the nature of things, reads character by character — and thinks that a character is a unichar, a 16-bit code point.

Our supplementary code plane contains unusual characters that don’t fit in a unichar! So we need two unichars, or four utf-8 bytes, to hold them. So, where we used to return a plain old unichar, now we return a bundle that might contain a unichar or might contain the longer character code:

The upside of this is that, once we are working with explicit TbxCharacters, we can make them do more work. For example, we could have methods that ask the character whether it's a backslash, or a quotation mark.

I usually wait to write about refactoring, if I write about them at all, only after they’ve succeeded. I thought it might be interesting to try this, and then see how things turn out.

Update: Two very long days later, the refactoring is mostly done. It was a bear; Monday evening, I left the office with a broken build. I almost never do that — I’d estimate perhaps once every two or three years — but dinner was urgent and something was breaking 132 tests. I managed to restore sanity on Tuesday morning by backing off some recent changes that I’d made with too much confidence; as usual, straying from conservative test-driven work had led me astray,

Nice email from a user to report that they, too, had experienced this crash and that they appreciated the imminent fix.

by Gabriel Kreuther and Michael Ruhlman

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A beautifully-produced and evocative book by an Alsatian farm boy who became a famous New York fine dining chef. The book combines two separate books. The first is a nice cookbook about traditional foods in Alsace with an emphasis on home cooking. The second is an ambitious cookbook that takes ideas from traditional dishes and adds elegant ingredients and modernist technique. It makes for good reading.

by Jennifer Ackerman

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An engaging, informal treatment of the natural history of the owl. People like owls, because owls look like people. (In some places, people mistrust owls for the same reason, thinking that they prophecy death and disaster.) They’re fascinating creatures with some curious habits; Burrowing Owls, for example, like to decorate their burrows with pretty little things. Some owls keep blind snakes as pets in order to help clean their nest. Some male Snowy Owls summer in the arctic and then, when the cold really sets in, fly even further North to hunt ducks and geese.

We’re learning a lot from some ingenious equipment — remote cameras, tiny little owl-sized backpacks, in-flight brain scans. I’d hoped to learn more about what owls know, because a lot of progress is being made right now in animal cognition. We just don’t know very much, alas, not yet.

A Pattern Language is a hypertext built around the Christopher Alexander classic. Very cool! Via Dave Gray.

by John Vinci, ed.

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This fascinating (and gorgeous) book examines Adler & Sullivan’s lost masterpiece. Built in 1891, this was briefly the world’s tallest building. Demolished in 1961, it had become an unwanted derelict, soon to be replaced by a grimy parking garage.

John Vinci, the editor, had recently finished college when he got a temporary job with photographer Richard Nickel, to work on salvaging some of the building’s amazing terra-cotta and plaster ornamentation. This three-man crew worked just steps ahead of the wreckers, but their notes offer fascinating insights into how the building worked, how it was built, and how its design was compromised by neglect and bad taste. Chris Ware, the comic book artist, designed the book, and it’s simply amazing.

My paper on “Amiability and the Web: Lessons from Red Vienna and the Origin of Computing” has been accepted for the History of the Web track of this year’s WWW Conference! So it looks like I’ll be heading to Sydney at the end of April.

Boiling Point (2021) is a decent British movie about backstage life at a fine restaurant.

Cooked (2025), also known as Umami, is a decent Turkish movie about backstage life at a fine restaurant. It seemed sensible to drop in and continue the binge.

What makes it really interesting is that Cooked is a very faithful remake of Boiling Point. The changes are slight, which makes them especially intriguing.

The World Figure Skating Championships are in Boston next month. I have tickets. I know nothing about figure skating, beyond what one picks up from watching the Olympics on TV. So I’m reading tutorials, queuing up books, and I’m watching movies.

One thing I’ve learned is that it can be really helpful to go back a few decades. They used to be slower, and the jumps were doubles and triples. Got back a few decades more and the jumps are singles, which are far easier to see!

This movie is a fairly silly revision of Taming Of The Shrew, but it has moments. “Toe-pick!”

by Brian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman

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A terrific book, through which I am cooking. I’m not religious about this, and I’m not planning a Julia, but this is a fun book, and since it seems I can withstand pie crusts as well as plain bread, pies are more fun.

So far I’ve tried short rib pie, chicken pot pie (biscuits), chorizo and goat cheese pie (twice), and smoked turkey pot pie (with extra leeks and no celery — oops). Really good.

Working on the next book, I was reading Lars Spuybroek on “The Aesthetics Of Variation.” Spuybroek said something interesting about Hogarth’s depiction of crowds, citing Walter Benjamin. I wondered exactly what Benjamin said, so I Googled it. The AI assistant told me that the discussion would be found in “The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction.” This was certainly plausible, as Hogarth’s memory is very much bound up with mechanical reproduction.

But Google was wrong. It’s not there; it is in The Arcades Project.

The Information City generates some interesting energy simply by placing building next to other buildings.

At the right, the house with the sign holds my notes on Ruskin’s aesthetics and, specifically, his list of the properties of the Gothic. Those notes were becoming long, so I split some of them into separate notes concerning specific Ruskinian qualities — savageness, changefulness, generosity. Those wander down a narrow street to the right; I can see them and select them, but they’re not the foreground right now.

In front, we have two related sets of reading notes. One holds reactions to Daniel E. Snyder’s interesting book on The Tender Detail: ornament and sentimentality in the architecture of Louis H. Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, which I’m reading to learn more about how people feel about urban settings like the Information City. Next to it, I have a second set of reading notes on an essay that Snyder mentions, The Aesthetics Of Variation” by Lars Spuybroek. One thing that became evident very early in the development of the Information City is that, if every building looks alike, it’s hard to find the one you want. We address this, at least for now, by adding lots of variations and decorations to buildings. They can have different window treatments and different door shapes. They can have awnings, or not. They can have signposts, or not. Some can have outdoor tables, or just benches. So, without going overboard on models, combinatorics give us a ton of distinct buildings. Some axes of variation might have semantic meanings: I’m using green buildings for current topics such as ToDo lists and release notes. Some axes might reflect implicit meanings; I’d like the level of lights we see through the window to reflect how recently the note was edited.

Rachel Miller and Alex Caruso have taken a tiny space in Lynn and turned it into one of the most interesting and challenging restaurants in the US.

We went because we had an anniversary, and it was terrific. Nine courses, maybe ten? Caviar and potato chips with ethereal custard fluff was the first course. Fresh Portuguese barnacles — barnacles! — poached and chilled and served over crushed ice, with the delightful spicy dipping sauce that, I’m told, is simply ⅓ salt, ⅓ black pepper, and ⅓ lime juice. Beats mignonette by a country mile.

There was an amazing shrimp toast would not be out of place at Alinea. There was a tiny Vietnamese-inflected lobster roll in a tiny custom-baked Boston-style bun. There was a kabocha squash course with crispy confit duck tongues. All with some really daring wine pairings.

This goes beyond authenticity: it’s not your grandmother’s Vietnamese/French comfort food. (Neither Miller’s grandmother nor mine, I expect, was Vietnamese. My grandmother didn’t cook if she could help it.) This is really thinking through what terrific food we can make, in a world where we can get Nước Chấm and diver scallops. The only comparable I can come up with is Mandy Lee’s Escapism Cooking: Miller, like Lee, likes to have a lot going on, fireworks in the mouth and excitement on the plate. She’s very big on flavor and texture contrasts, and they pair nicely with some really complex wines (oh, that Lapeyre Jurançon had a lot to say!). But Lee’s book is, at least in part, performance art; Miller is doing stuff on the plate, four nights a week.