This is the personal homepage of P.D. Magnus, a philosopher whom I like to refer to as me. I have a separate professional homepage that links to courses, my cv, and academic papers.

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Get the lead out [permalink]

5jun2009: I have written before about the raised bed that we built for growing vegetables last year. This year, we expanded the garden. We put the beds in at ground level. This allowed us to put beds along the side of the house, since we can't build raised beds up against the foundation. It was also less work and cheaper.

In the course of digging, weeding, and planting, Cristyn sent off a soil sample for analysis. The initial report indicated shortages in some nutrients, but nothing major. Last Friday, however, we got the long-delayed report on heavy metals. The dirt in our yard has unsafe levels of lead. Not Superman-can't-see-through-it levels, but still don't-eat-the-foliage levels.

So we adjusted our plans, had bricks and dirt delivered, and got to work. In two days, we replaced the ground-level bed that we'd made for the gooseberries with a raised bed. (It's the one in the background of the photo.) The gooseberry bushes are young, and they'll be in the new, safe soil a long time before we get any berries off of them. Since it's a big bed, Cristyn also moved a bunch of other plants in with the sapling bushes.

Since mint plants spread aggressively, you can't put mint in a bed with other plants. The usual solution is to grow mint in pots. Our solution was to give mint its own little bed. Today we made it a raised bed. (Foreground of the photo.)

Next week, we put in the final raised bed around the corner in the back yard.

Also NEW: I've changed the image in the upper left corner of this page again.

Captain's log [permalink]

Stardate 22may2009: Cristyn and I went to see the new Star Trek movie at a matinee today. It was a good time.* It was (I think) among the best Trek movies ever. The script gave every character a chance to shine, and the actors managed to establish a lot with just a little screen time. I'd love to see the cast return for a regular series, preferably a TV series.

There are elements of Star Trek tradition throughout the movie. It's done well, giving a shout out to fans, without wallowing in nostalgia or distracting viewers who aren't already steeped in decades of Trek. I surmise the last part, because I got many of the references; I resisted the temptation to keep score.

However, I think I earn serious geek cred for seeing the name Deep Roy in the credits, leaning over to Cristyn, and saying, "That's the guy who played in the Peking homunculus in Talons of Wang-Chieng." Cross-pollinating Trek to Doctor Who geekery for the win!

Extra cross pollinating geek points if you can name the sci-fi series in which Deep Roy appeared as the Klute.

* I don't mean 'good time' in the sense in which the Star Wars prequels were a good time - entertaining but hollow echoes, puppets with strings made of nostalgia. This was an unequivocally good movie.

A game about mazes [permalink]

27apr2009: I designed the game Ambagibus almost ten years ago. It was sufficiently enjoyable that I gave copies to lots of people I know and even used it as a stocking stuffer one Christmas. I forget what I called it originally, but it was called The Philosopher's Maze for a while (too self indulgent), then Ambages Philosophorum (bleah), and later Ambages (too hard to pronounce). The current name is Latin for 'about mazes.'

I submitted it to a game company or two, but it was declined. Submitting games to publishers, waiting for their reply, sending follow up letters, and that whole rigamarole is too much like submitting philosophy papers to journals, following up with them, and the scholarly rigamarole - in short, too much like work I have to do as part of my day job. So the game spent several years sitting idle in the back of a drawer and on my hard drive.

This is a bit of a copout, perhaps, because it is not clear that this game is worth publishing. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the proof of the game is in the playing - but the proof of the publishable product is in the publishing. Regardless, I am skipping the whole pudding submission process and making the solitaire version of the game available. It (like many of my games) is available here as an electronic document under an open license.

Also NEW: I've changed the image in the upper left corner of this page. It started as a photo of me at a workshop in Pittsburgh, and I hammered on it some in Photoshop.

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