It gets mossy around here.

#mosstodon

Really enjoying having a functional window in my home office for the first time in almost six years! And it’s nice to have it be a double hung so that I can open the top sash a bit to let in fresh air, and my feet don’t get cold in two minutes like they do with the bottom sash.

Thinking of summer aka It’s summer somewhere.

Film: Kodak Ultramax (ISO 400)
Camera: Voigtländer Bessa R2a

Happy New Year! 🥳

Woke up to a dry non-overcast morning after a while. Went over to Mt. Tabor to walk around a bit.

RIP Pelé

I was playing with the pandas library on python and picked the IMDb dataset to explore.

To give myself a learning goal, I asked the following question:

What movies are generally regarded as the best that have multiple directors?

After some finagling the dataset (of multiple large CSV files) I arrived at the following list of twenty, in descending order of average rating:

1. The Matrix (1999) • 8.7
   Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski

2. City of God (2002) • 8.6
   Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund

3. The Intouchables (2011) • 8.5
   Olivier Nakache, Éric Toledano

4. Avengers: Endgame (2019) • 8.4
   Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

5. Avengers: Infinity War (2018) • 8.4
   Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

6. No Country for Old Men (2007) • 8.2
   Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

7. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) • 8.2
   Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones

8. Gone with the Wind (1939) • 8.2
   Victor Fleming, George Cukor, Sam Wood

9. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) • 8.1
   Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert

10. The Big Lebowski (1998) • 8.1
    Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

11. Fargo (1996) • 8.1
    Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

12. The Wizard of Oz (1939) • 8.1
    Victor Fleming, King Vidor, Richard Thorpe, Norman Taurog, Mervyn LeRoy, George Cukor

13. Slumdog Millionaire (2008) • 8.0
    Danny Boyle, Loveleen Tandan

14. Sin City (2005) • 8.0
    Frank Miller, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez

15. Captain America: Civil War (2016) • 7.8
    Joe Russo, Anthony Russo

16. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) • 7.8
    Anthony Russo, Joe Russo

17. Little Miss Sunshine (2006) • 7.8
    Jonathan Dayton, Valerie Faris

18. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) • 7.7
    Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

19. True Grit (2010) • 7.6
    Ethan Coen, Joel Coen

20. The Butterfly Effect (2004) • 7.6
    Eric Bress, J. Mackye Gruber

Some thoughts on these results:

• Most of the films here are from the last twenty-five years. Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz are the two remarkable exceptions, surprisingly from the same year, 1939, and with the same main director, Victor Fleming.
• Gone with the Wind has a runtime of 238 minutes, which is far above any other film here, and that makes it additionally remarkable that it is on this list.
• Everything Everywhere All at Once was a surprise to see here, given its newness. I wonder if its rating will go up or down with time.
• I have seen seventeen of these films. The others are now on my to-watch list 😄

Notes on the data filtering and sorting process to get to the final list:

• Only movies. This eliminated shorts, TV, etc.
• Not animated. Apparently it is common for animated movies to have more than one director, so they were sort of skewing the results away from what I really intended to discover, even though I didn’t realize it at the time I asked myself that leading question.
• High rating (> 7.5) and high number of votes (> 250000). I tweaked these to narrow down a short list. If I only maximized one or the other, the results didn’t seem representative of the question.
• Year of release used as a tie breaker. I figured a more recent film with a high rating had a larger impact on the zeitgeist and so deserved to be higher on the list.

The script can be found here.

P.S. The dataset obviously has biases and those impact the results.

I love the way Mythic Quest does the one flashback episode each season. Seasons 1 and 3 had really good ones.

I got a set of chisels for Christmas, so obviously I’m spending the afternoon practicing making a dovetail joint on a scrap piece of wood 😄

Merry Christmas!

Enola Holmes 2 was enjoyable but was maybe trying a bit too hard to live up to the qualities of the first film. Hpefully they can better balance that in the third film.

In the last week of our recent trip to India, Jenni and I went on an overnight trip from New Delhi to Agra to visit the Taj Mahal.

We arrived at the site a couple hours before sunset so the Sun was about halfway down which meant that as we walked around the campus, and the light changed color, we could see it all on play out the Taj. This was especially delightful. The primary stone in the construction is Makrana marble, which is famous for being strong and translucent.

The center of the main gate’s arch is perfectly aligned with the center of the main arch of the Taj Mahal, and both are perfectly aligned due North. Our guide, Tarun, made us aware of this and challenged us to check using the phone’s compass, which I did!

We walked the charbagh garden pathways, and made our way as Tarun took some photos of us all the while sharing the story of the Taj.

The work to cut stones and inlay them is very intricate and labor intensive and there’s a large industry that continues to do this work, the knowledge of which has been passed down for generations since the time of the Taj’s construction.

Inside the mausoleum, photography is prohibited, and the outer rooms are cordoned off. The replica of the graves of Mumtaz Mahal and Shah Jahan lie in the center, and one can walk around that in a designated path. The actual graves are in the basement underneath but that is inaccessible to the public. This is the original design.

A man with a small flashlight demonstrated how the stones in the inlaid flowers glow when light is applied on them. It is really a wonderful effect, and one that I don’t recall seeing on previous trips. This same man asked for our names by turn and said it out loud as he looked upwards, to sound an echo.

After walking around the inside, we made our way to the outside on the provided path. As we did so, the light of the setting sun made lovely patterns as it made its way in through the carved and perforated marble walls.

Even a Tuesday afternoon brought a lot of visitors.

As we made our way back to the exit by the main gate, the Sun set completely and so the Taj appeared a cool white, which was very different from the vibrant yellow and orange it had been in the hours before. I’m pretty sure that previously I had only visited in mid-day so hadn’t seen this effect. Experiencing these changing colors on the Taj was my favorite thing about this visit, which was my third or fourth.

Maybe someday I’ll even see the famous full-moon-lit shade of Taj.

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Home office humidity is down to 18%. Going to get the humidifier going even though it was spitting water the last time I used it #pdxtst

Early AM today was I think the first time ever that the heat pump was unable to warm up to set temperature. #pdxtst #ArcticBlast

We’re expecting some extreme cold weather tomorrow but Apple’s Weather app is not showing the alerts that have been issued. It’s really weird and many people are going to get caught off-guard. Every other weather app is showing the alerts.

RIP InSight

That was the best game of football. Congratulations Argentina! 🎉

Frosty dawn in the yard yesterday.

I’ve just returned from a three week trip to India which was full of spending time with family, events, some sightseeing. It was a whirlwind, but thankfully everything went smoothly 🥰. Been decompressing at home with jet lag, while catching up on work.

Sunset Taj

Scenes around New Delhi

It has been a while since I did one of these!

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Todays sunrise. A minute before this it was all shades of pink.

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