The sclerotic idiocy of the American Labor movement will be on full display at the World Figure Skating Championships.
Lots of figure skating fans like to give their favorite skaters stuffed animals after they perform. 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.
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.
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.
unichar Parser::Get()
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:
TbxCharacter Parser::Get()
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
