& the Real World

Martial arts in a skirt, eh? I thought that kind of thing only happened in anime.

(found via http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2007/01/anti-us-north-korean-posters.html)

The Dative

The dative, or indirect object, is one of the four core cases - those cases that are almost universal in languages that have case - along with nominative/absolutive, accusative/ergative, and the genitive.

While the details vary by language, the general concept for the dative is a goal or direction of an action (especially with regard to transfer or movement), or the one perceiving an action. In the study of grammatical role, the dative roughly corresponds to the role of goal (although it may have additional uses in a given language). While English has pretty much lost its case system, the logical dative remains, usually expressed with the prepositions 'to' or 'for'.

Some examples of the various uses in several languages from Wikipedia and other sources (note that I'm mainly covering the most common uses, not ones that are specific to certain languages):

Goal of Transfer:
Latin: "Regina puellae pecuniam dat" ("The queen gives money to the girl")
Japanese: "Kodomo ni yaru" ("Give to the child")

Goal of Movement:
Japanese: "Ano hito wa gakkou ni haitta" ("That man has gone to the school")

Goal of Intent or Benefit
Latin: "Auxilio vocare" ("I call for help")
Latin: "Puellae ornamento est" ("It is for the girl's decoration")
Latin: Graecis agros colere ("To till fields for the Greeks")
Greek: "τῷ βασιλεῖ μάχομαι" ("I fight for the king")
Greek: "πᾶς ἀνὴρ αὑτῷ πονεῖ" ("Every man toils for himself")

Goal of Experience:
Latin: "Vir bonus mihi videtur' 'the man seems good to me"
Latin: "Quid mihi Celsus agit?" ("What is Celsus doing [that I am interested in]?")

One of the more peculiar uses (at least for English speakers, as I don't think English has anything like it), is the dative of possession. This renders phrases of possession as phrases of existence with the possessor in the dative. The logical basis of this usage is that in terms of grammatical role, in phrases of possession the possessor is technically classified as the goal.

Some examples:
Latin: "Angelis alae sunt" (literally "For angels there are wings"; freely "Angels have wings")
Greek: "ἄλλοις μὲν γὰρ χρήματα ἐστι πολλὰ καὶ ἵπποι, ἡμῖν δὲ ξύμμαχοι ἀγαθοί" (literally "For others there is a lot of money and ships and horses, but for us there are good allies")
Japanese: "Watashi ni tsuno ga nai" (literally "For me there aren't horns")
Tsez: "Кидбехъор кIетIу зовси" (literally "For the girl there was a cat")

Random Fact of the Day

I just learned that some lizards (e.g. Gila Monsters, Komodo Dragons) are venomous.

MRI scans of a preserved skull showed the presence of two poison glands in the lower jaw. They extracted one of these glands from the head of a terminally ill specimen in the Singapore Zoological Gardens, and found that it secreted a venom containing several different toxic proteins. The known functions of these proteins include inhibition of blood clotting, lowering of blood pressure, muscle paralysis, and the induction of hypothermia, leading to shock and loss of consciousness in envenomated prey.

I'd always heard what had been previously believed - that they merely had toxic bacteria in their mouths that was transferred in bites.

Basic Word Order

Obviously, English typically has has the word order subject-verb[-(direct) object] (or SVO, for short). This can be altered in specific situations due to WH-movement (e.g. OSV in "What would you like?") and other structures, but SVO is the normal word order.

However, this isn't the only possible word order. Basic combination math tells us that there are six possible orders: SVO, SOV (e.g. Japanese, Korean, Latin, and Proto-Indo-European), VSO (e.g. Hebrew, Trique, and Caia), VOS, OSV, OVS; these are, however, not all equally likely.

Two rules have been developed which govern the prominence of different word orders. First, there's a tendency for the subject to precede the (direct) object. This is known as subject salience. There have been various theories on the exact reason for this; the general idea is that it's more natural for the subject to precede the object because they subject is typically the source of an action, and thus precedes the object in both cause and effect and chronological order.

The other is that there is a tendency for the object to sit next to the verb (on either side). Linguistics thus far has developed the notion that the object and the verb logically form a structure called the predicate, which stands apart from the subject (i.e. a clause is typically defined as a subject + a predicate). I haven't investigated the full depth of why this has been decided, so I couldn't really give more detail than that (though it's noteworthy that this idea is consistent with my hypothesis that language began as commands - the command forms the predicate, and the subject was added in later).

Thus, we have four classes of word order: those that meet both conditions, those that meet one or the other, and those that meet neither. In agreement with theory, SVO and SOV are by far the most common among languages, at 42% and 45%, respectively. On the distant second tier is VSO, which places the subject between verb and object, occurring with 9% frequency. On the again distant third tier are VOS, and OVS, each placing the object before the subject; these occur with 3% and 1% frequency, respectively. At the bottom is OSV, which violates both rules, and was not seen in any language in this survey of 402 languages.

Clearly the subject salience rule dominates in significance, as orders where object precedes subject are very rare (3% or less); although it's also true that languages where the object is not next to the verb are uncommon (9% or less).

& Spring 2009 Anime Music

I've been meaning to write a post about the anime series I'm watching this season (though some I still haven't decided if I'm gonna watch all of yet), but thus far (up to and including now) I've been too lazy to actually do it.

Instead, I'll do something that's substantially less work for me: post some of the theme songs of series I'm watching with (very) brief comments.

The Asura Cryin' ending theme is really the one that made me decide to do this post. Which is to say I'm fond of it.


The music within the series also didn't seem too bad. I haven't heard enough to decide whether I think it's good, it's certainly superior to the typical mediocre anime music.

The opening isn't as good as the ending, but not bad, especially the first 20 seconds or so.


As I watched the Pandora Hearts opening theme, the short violin segment reminded me of Yuki Kajiura, one of my favorite composers, who is known especially for very pretty violin pieces. A quick look on Anime News Network confirmed that the series was indeed done by her. I wouldn't say the opening is her best work, but it's certainly not bad.


So that should mean the music for the series will be pretty good.

The ending isn't as good as the opening, but from a quick glance at the credits I don't think it was done by her (it's fairly common for the openings and/or endings to be done by different composers than the series music - often real bands). It also isn't bad.


K-ON! is a quirky series. It's amusing, but excessively cute. From what I've seen so far, the music is very mediocre, though the opening and ending aren't quite so much, though for different reasons.

About all I have to say about that is that I don't think I'll be listening to that opening apart from showing it to people with hangovers.

The ending is similarly loud, but substantially better; palatable, and even a bit catchy. I do really like the animation that goes along with the ending theme - parts of it are quite artistic, and look very sharp (such as the black and white ensemble).

Empathy Hierarchy and Other Ungodly Things

A ways back I wrote a post about empathy (also called animacy or agency) hierarchies and how the empathy hierarchy in Spanish and other romance languages worked, explaining a peculiarity of their grammar that had haunted me since high school Spanish. Unfortunately, I was excited at the time I was writing, and didn't explain it near as clearly as I should have.

Anyway, to briefly recap, empathy hierarchy is a system of classifying entities (e.g. nouns) according to the level of empathy the speaker feels towards them. While the number and composition of levels vary by language, the general trends are 1st person >= 2nd person >= 3rd person, animate >= inanimate, definite >= indefinite (e.g. "those people" >= "some people"). In Spanish there were three levels with regard to verb agreement: 1st person ("[yo] juego" - "I play") > 2nd person familiar ("[tú] juegas") > 2nd person formal ("usted juega") + 3rd person ("[él] juega"); this makes logical sense because you would have more empathy towards those you would address with the 2nd person familiar (e.g. your friends and family) than those you would address with the formal 2nd person (e.g. people you meet on the street). One of the most common things governed by empathy hierarchy is verb agreement, which is exactly what is seen in Spanish in the above examples.

One of the languages (actually a family of languages) I'm creating for one of my stories turns the concept of empathy hierarchy completely upside-down. In these languages, verbs agree with the subject, direct object [if any], and indirect object [if any] (this is as complicated as it sounds, though some real "polypersonal" languages actually do have verbs that agree with all three of those). As the subject, direct object, and indirect object are not marked for case and word order is free, verb agreement is really the only way to tell who's doing what in a sentence; for example, you could have something like "Dog bone boy gaveheitit" or "Bone boy dog gaveheitit", which would mean more or less the same thing, as word order isn't important in this respect (word order indicates more subtle things, such as what is emphasized in a sentence).

However, instead of relying on animacy or empathy to create this agreement system (animacy and/or empathy being pretty much universal in natural languages, as far as I know), these languages use rank. Specifically, a seven-tiered hierarchy with levels I label -3 (lowest) to +3 (highest). For humans, rank reflects social status relative to the speaker. Rank 0 is reserved for the first person, ranks below 0 represent those below the social status of the speaker, and ranks above 0 above the speaker, with the degree of difference indicated by the rank (rank x + 1 > rank x); e.g. use of rank 2 by the speaker to refer to someone would mean that that person has a social status substantially higher than that of the speaker. For nonhumans (animals and inanimate objects) rank is based on respect for that thing - positive and/or honorable things would have high rank, negative or dishonorable things would have low rank; in this way rank resembles more arbitrary noun class systems.

Now, depending on how deeply you thought about what I just said, you may or may not already be scared of this idea; so let me illustrate. Suppose you have two coworkers at a job talking to each other (thus they'd be of the same social status). As it's customary to show some respect to those of the same rank as you in East Asian cultures (these languages are loosely based on Japanese, with a bunch of fun stuff thrown in), both would refer to each other ("you" in English) with the +1 level. However, as this system does not distinguish between 2nd and 3rd person, if one of them uses the +1 level for something, it could just as easily refer to some third co-worker who wasn't a part of the conversation (a 3rd person, no pun intended). Or it could simply refer to some inanimate object that just happens to be at the +1 rank.

But that's easy stuff. Now imagine a person writing to a politician. If this was just an average person, they might use rank +2 to refer to the politician ("you", in English), given the significant difference in social status. The politician would then use rank -2 to refer to the person (or -1, if the politician wanted to be polite), which would also be written "you" in English. Now suppose they were talking about the king. The lay person would probably refer to the king with +3 rank; the politician, however, would use a lower rank (+1 or +2), as their own social status is greater. Of course, any of these (-2, -1, +1, +2, +3) could simply be referring to an inanimate object, instead.

Worse yet, the innate rank of an animal or inanimate object could be modified based on the rank of a possessor; that is, if the possessor of an object has a significantly different rank than the speaker, the rank of the thing possessed might be elevated or lowered to reflect the possessor.
Suppose that dog' has an innate rank of +1. In the previous scenario, the person might then use rank +1 to refer to his dog, +2 to refer to the politician's dog, and +2 or +3 to refer to the king's dog. The politician, on the other hand, might refer to his own dog as +1, the person's dog as -1, and the king's dog as +2.

And as one last nail in the coffin of sanity is a concept I call the heterogeneous plural. That is, a plural that comprises members of significantly different rank. In this case, the rank of the group as a whole would be the rank of the highest-ranking member. So if the person writing a politician referred to level +3, he could be referring the the king, the king and the politician together, the king's dog, or something else entirely.

That's me: raping your mind since 1983.

Moving On Up

I'd heard all of this from him directly, but I just ran across this post on the ZDNet Security blog - Microsoft adds 'Skywing' to Windows defense team.

Incidentally, Miller is the arch-nemesis I mentioned earlier.

Random Late-Night Thought

For a while I've been aware of a particular piece of linguistic evidence - namely, that cross-linguistically it is common for the imperative (command) form of verbs to be shorter than other forms, seemingly lacking inflectional affixes applied to other conjugations. For example, in Old English, the verb 'creopan' (infinitive form) is 'creope' for first person singular, 'criepth' for third person singular, but 'creop' for imperative singular. This led me to hypothesize that language might have begun as commands, and later evolved to support more general types of expressions by the addition of affixes or extra words.

Think about the significance of this for a moment. One of the most frequent differences between normal sentences and imperative sentences is that the imperative usually does not have a (stated) subject, while, depending on the language, general sentences may require subjects.

Now, one of the big mysteries of linguistics is how we came to have such radically different language systems as accusative, ergative, and topic-comment*. Yet if commands were all that was originally spoken, this provides us with a trivial answer: initially, there was only a direct object and no subject, thus that language would predate the differentiation of the three types.

As the language evolved further, eventually there would be the need to add in a subject; how exactly this was handled would then determine which of the three paths was taken. Accusative languages would place the subject in a separate case (nominative) from the direct object (accusative case). Ergative languages would classify the subject based on whether its role is the agent (ergative case) or patient (absolutive case). Finally, topic-comment languages would place the subject (the topic) completely apart from the rest of the sentence (the comment).

*Since I don't think I've talked too much about topic-comment structure, I'll briefly explain here. In topic-comment languages, a topic is stated for a sentence or set of sentences, then a number of comments are made regarding that topic. Japanese, Korean, and Chinese are like this, among others, although it's also possible to use a periphrastic form in languages like English (e.g. "As for the movie [the topic], we'll meet at 2 [the comment]").

Of particular relevance, one thing the topic can be used for is the subject of the sentence, e.g. "As for him, he'll be coming later" (though true topic-comment languages usually wouldn't duplicate the subject as English does - it would be more like "As for him, will come later"); this is frequently done in Japanese and Korean, for example. Of course, the comment may have a different subject than the topic, so topic-comment languages may also be accusative or ergative (e.g. Japanese is accusative). Here I am hypothesizing that initially the subject was represented exclusively as the topic, then further evolution allowed the subject to be within the comment itself (although whether this is true is relatively unimportant to the theory that languages began as commands).

Curve Ball

Some surprising last-minute good news from France:

After the parliament voted in favor of the law, no one doubted that it would be approved by the senate and National Assembly as well. As expected the law was indeed ratified by the senate this morning, but to everyone’s surprise it didn’t make it through the National Assembly.
...
Unfortunately the law is not completely off the table. It is likely to be voted on again on April 27 according to members of UMP, one of the supporting parties. However, failing to get it passed through the National Assembly the first time is clearly a huge mistake that is almost amateurish, and public opinion is not likely to change anytime soon.

Which I suppose makes for a (tentative) good-triumphs-over-evil-in-the-end Hollywood ending, after what the proponents of the law pulled in parliament.

Name That Movie

See if you can recognize this one.

A bill written by big business interests is proposed in French parliament. Hugely controversial, the bill is opposed by most apart from the business interests that wrote it, and it is difficult to see how it could pass (although you can never underestimate the corruption of government officials). As the deadline for the vote draws near, an intense debate lasting 42 hours straight breaks out among parliament members.

Eventually, late Thursday evening, it is decided that the debate should cease and parliament members should go home for the night, and the bill would be voted on the next week. So, parliament members do exactly that. After about 98% of parliament members have left the building, the vote is called early, at nearly 11 PM on Thursday night. With 16 members remaining, the bill passes, 12 to 4.

Can you name that movie?

Actually you can't, because it actually happened - yesterday. This is the French Three-Strikes law, which promises to disconnect people from the internet on allegation of copyright infringement, without ever having to present evidence in court or even tell the accused what copyright they are thought to have infringed. It will also require running spyware on all computers that constantly talks to government systems and monitors activity and the state of your network.

Welcome to French democracy, proving that America really isn't that bad afterall.

& Patents... or Lack Thereof

A ways back (might have even been a couple years), I came up with an idea for something called Anonymous Private Mail, or a-p mail, a system of e-mail which provides for much greater privacy. Rather than using an e-mail address, a-p mail identifies individuals by their public/private key pair used to encrypt the e-mails (the private part). What made the a-p mail system so novel was that it was able to route a message from sender to receiver without ever knowing the keys of the sender or recipient (the anonymous part). Because of this, the e-mail server (or anyone monitoring it) could not even tell if two e-mails were sent by the same person or received by the same person (in contrast to normal e-mail systems, where the server always knows at least the e-mail address of the receiver).

I was initially concerned about disclosing how it works, especially with regard to patenting it. This system originated in one of my stories (the universe of Starfall and Eve of Tomorrow, which I briefly mentioned previously) as a method allowing criminals (especially terrorists) to communicate. I was concerned that if I patented it, it would be used in the same was it was used in the story. For this reason I posted the basic description (essentially what I wrote above) on this blog and some forums, asking for comments about whether I should patent it or keep it secret forever.

Eventually, a consensus opinion was reached that if I'd managed to come up with this idea, others would also be able to, so the only thing that keeping it secret would do is prevent me from potentially receiving licensing fees for the patent on it. So, after a great deal of procrastination (me being me), I finally wrote up the patent application and submitted it to the US Patent and Trademark Office last Thursday.

While not entirely unforeseeable, I was still very surprised to find two men in suits at my front door on Friday. To make a long discussion short, they explained that they were from the US Department of Homeland Security; they had seen my patent application, and, apparently, I wasn't the only one concerned about the possible application of the method to criminal organizations (particularly terrorism). They informed me that they'd deleted my patent application, and presented me with a federal gag order barring me from disclosing the details of the method to anyone else (including making further attempts to patent it).

So, I guess I won't be patenting it afterall. Funny how all decisions become easy when you're reduced to only a single option... At least this won't impact my stories - as they weren't targeted specifically at people with great knowledge of computers, most people wouldn't have understood the thing even if I had explained how it worked in the stories.

So Much for That

A couple weeks ago I happened to be at a certain computer store. I happened to notice that they had a sale on a GeForce 9400 GT 512 meg video card for $40 (normally $70). While I already have a sufficiently powerful video card, I'd been thinking for a while about picking up a cheap GeForce, in case I ever felt inclined to play with CUDA (my video card is an ATI). So, I grabbed one.

After a sufficient amount of procrastination (specifically, two weeks, bringing it to the last day to return it), I figured I should see about opening it and installing it, to make sure it works. But first I decided to do a bit of research: namely, whether you can have both an ATI and nVidia card in the computer at a time. Obviously this should work, but with the ATI and nVidia war, driver idiocy, etc., you never know.

Well, it turns out that you can't - at least, not in Vista (I'm using 2008, which is based on Vista). Specifically, Vista only allows one WDDM display driver to be loaded at a time; this means that if you have multiple video cards, they all need to use the same video driver. While Vista still supports older XP XPDM display drivers (and allows multiple XPDM drivers to be loaded at once), it'll cost you - WDDM drivers are required for things such as Aero and DirectX 10; worse, you can't have one driver that's XPDM and one that's WDDM. Windows 7 is rumored to support multiple WDDM display drivers at once.

And that's why I tried it while it was still returnable, and didn't open it before doing some basic research.

Die, .NET. Thanks.

So, just encountered an (extremely) evil quirk of the .NET platform in a bug.

Everyone who programs .NET knows that one key difference between the two is that structs are (without ref specified) always passed by value, while classes are passed by reference. Apparently that rule is not limited to actual passing of structs, themselves; passing a "pointer" to a callback function for an instance of a struct causes a copy of the entire struct to be passed, and the callback is then called on that copy, not your original instance.

Example:
system.FindCollisions(collisionSet.OnPossibleCollision, workingSet);

In this line, FindCollisions receives a local copy of collisionSet. When it then calls that callback function, that callback operates on the local copy, not on collisionSet itself.

I'm not sure whether this is by design or whether it's a bug. While it's consistent with the policy of always passing structs by value, the fact that it's so counter-intuitive makes me wonder if it might not be a bug.

& More Piracy

I haven't written about it as much on this blog as other places (instant messages, IRC, various forums, etc.), but I'm a huge opponent of both Digital Rights Management (also known as Content Restriction, Annulment and Protection) and draconian anti-piracy efforts like the RIAA's law suit campaign. This was based on the belief that regardless of the raw numbers (e.g. total P2P downloads of something vs. actual sales), the total number of lost sales due to piracy was low enough that it was better to just eat the losses as part of the cost of doing business than to expend the effort, cost, and public good will to try and fight piracy (which wouldn't work anyway). Specifically, I was guessing that the actual losses were in the 5-15% range - that is, if there were 0 piracy, producers could sell 5-15% more of whatever they make.

However, just now I came across some rather shocking statistics, complements of the makers of World of Goo (a game that shipped without DRM). According to their data collection, 82% of copies of the game played were pirated. That's higher than I expected, but that wasn't the shocking part: that the ratio of pirated copies to lost sales is about 1000:1. Crunching the numbers and rounding up a bit to err on the side of caution, this means that the actual losses of piracy are less than 0.6% of the revenue they make from legitimate sales. This is between 8 and 25 times lower than I thought it would be.

These numbers absolutely demolish the claims that

1. Internet piracy seriously hurts publishers (the actual damage is negligibly small)
   
2. That DRM does more help than harm by reducing piracy (with levels of losses that low, there isn't any room for DRM to help, yet it's clear that it does a substantial amount of harm)
   

Random Linguistic Fact of the Day

Technically English (and I think all Germanic languages) doesn't have a future tense. The future is rendered as a mood in English, using a modal (mood auxiliary) verb, in the same class as (and mutually exclusive with) "can", "may", "must", "would", etc. The past and present tenses, on the other hand, are true tenses, and both in the indicative mood (no modal verb or the "do" dummy modal verb).

The logical basis for this distinction has to do with the concept of realis. Essentially that means what it looks like: realis moods have to do with 'real' things - things which are considered certain to have already happened; while irrealis moods are not certain for one reason or another. There's a general tendency in language to regard the future as inherantly uncertain, and thus place it in an irrealis mood.

Whether this is a peculiarity of Germanic languages or is universal among Indo-European languages is unclear. In Latin there is a future tense for the imperative mood (commands - an irealis mood) as well as indicative (events that are certain - a realis mood), but not for subjunctive or supine, two other irealis moods.

For trivia value: Caia does not have tense; aspect and mood are used to imply tense, and if tense must be made absolutely certain, it can be indicated with adverbs. It has three basic moods (more complex moods are specified with helper verbs or particles): indicative, potential, and hypothetical. As in English, the indicative is used for events considered certain, and is used primarily for past and present tense. Potential mood indicates that an event is possible, but not certain; it is used for the future, among other things (although the preferred method of referring to the future is to reduce it to a certain, indicative present expression such as "I intend to go" or "I want to go", which is more precise). The hypothetical refers to events that are known to be false (hence talking about a hypothetical, counter-factual "what if" situation).

Random Linguistic Fact of the Day

Ever wonder why it's fairly common to create compound nouns from phrases (e.g. bird-watching, card-carrying), but in all these cases the object comes before the verb participle? Based on English word order it should be watching-bird, etc., yet it never is.

This is probably due to the fact that word order in Proto-Indo-European was very different than the word order used in English and most other Indo-European languages today. In particular, instead of the subject-verb-object order typically used today, PIE (along with more recent ones, like Latin) preferred the subject-object-verb word order. So you might say things like "Avem [bird] spectabam [I watched]" in Latin, which is exactly the order seen in the compounds.

Here We Go Again!

It's that time again: the beginning of the next anime season; the winter 2009 season, in this case, and things look pretty bleak. THAT Anime Blog put their preview up quite a while ago. I'd been waiting to post until Random Curiosity posted theirs, although then I was too lazy to actually post when they did, a week ago or so :P

So, what's Q looking forward to? Well, not much. I'll probably watch Slayers EVOLUTION-R because I have a couple of friends that absolutely love that franchise. I downloaded the first episode of White Album (though I haven't watched it) mainly because of the pretty pictures on Random Curiosity's first episode review; we'll see how that turns out. Other than that, there are three series that, while I can't say they sound great, I'm at least willing to try watching a couple episodes and see - Chrome Shelled Regios, Black God (listed as "Kurokami the Animation" on Random Curiosity), Kemono no Souja Erin [The Beast Player Erin] (in no particular order).

Really, the closest thing to something I'm "looking forward to" on that list is Minami-ke Okaeri [Minami family, welcome home]. While I wouldn't name it among my favorites, the Minami-ke franchise was sufficiently amusing to make me watch more of it (although it has a bit more cross-dressing than I'd care for).

I'd say the best stuff ("best" is a relative measure, here) is the two+-season series that are continuing into this season. Toradora!, Clannad After Story, Skip-Beat!, Toaru Majutsu no Index [A Certain Magical Index], and Tales of the Abyss, listed vaguely in the order I like them.

However, I do have good news. I recently saw a mini-review on the sidebar of Anime News Network for a series by the name of Higurashi no Naku Koro ni ["when the cicadas cry", though the official translation is "Higurashi - When They Cry"] that kind of intrigued me; a quick look on AniDB revealed that it was fairly well-rated (although the art style is hideous). So, I grabbed it. While the first roughly 2/3 of the series were sufficiently amusing to hold my interest, the last third of the season really elevated my opinion of it, and made me recommend it to all my friends. However, this series is not for the faint of heart, faint of stomach, or those who don't like brutal, tragic stories that don't have happy endings.

It's a big of a peculiar series. It's structured into a number of arcs (six in the first season), falling into the categories of question arcs and answer arcs. Question arcs are kind of horror/thriller type, where a lot of weird stuff happens, but a lot of it is left unexplained, as to why it happened to begin with. Answer arcs explain parts of the series - why things happened the way they did, and what is behind some of the strange occurrances in question arcs. Oddly, while some of the arcs are compatible, others appear to take place in different universes, as they're mutually exclusive subject matter occurring at the same time, to the same characters. The last arc of the first season, however, suggests that there are actually parallel worlds that aren't entirely separate, and there's some crossover between them; the details are left, presumably, to the second season (Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai) or the OVA, which I haven't seen yet.

In any case, I've quickly become attached to it (I watched all 26 episodes in 2 days, which is more than I usually watch of anime), and I'm a bit depressed by running out of the first season to watch.

You can get it from a variety of places, at least one of which is downloadable online (*cough* Boxtorrents *cough*); note that the first season has 26 episodes, while they second has 24. I'd definitely recommend watching it. If you want to start with the best part, I'd say watch episodes 5-8 and 16-21 (both contain the same story, but from different perspectives; the latter explains what was going on in the background of the former, and shows why things turned out the way they did). Though even if you don't skip ahead, I'd recommend watching those two arcs back-to-back at some point, as they're part of the same story.

Switching Gears

After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy.
...
Instead, the Recording Industry Association of America said it plans to try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers. The trade group said it has hashed out preliminary agreements with major ISPs under which it will send an email to the provider when it finds a provider's customers making music available online for others to take.

Wall Street Journal

I definitely did not expect this so soon, as progress in the courts of stopping the RIAA's legal campaign is proceeding at a crawl, and the RIAA could probably have continued for a while longer before getting hit with serious legal penalties.

Graphics Programming Term Project

In case anybody is interested, here is the paper for my term project in graphics class. I was working on an implementation of it, but thanks to various brick wall problems, that didn't end up getting completed in time (which is why the results section does not discuss the results of the actual implementation), although it did result in me going 38 hours without sleep. It's an interesting method, and at least a couple small parts of it are novel (I'm not aware of them being proposed before), but probably isn't practically useful for the reasons explained in the paper.

Multi-Fragment Deferred Shading Using Index Rendering

& More Echoes

BahamutZero has informed me that Echoes of War is now available on iTunes+ (DRM-free 256 kbps AAC audio downloads) for $14.85 (the two CDs in Echoes of War are sold separately, totaling that price). I'm not aware of the actual CDs being available anywhere but Eminence, the creators. If you just want the audio files without the shipping (my Legendary Edition cost like $12 shipping), check out iTunes.