In a small triumph for the community, the vague term that is “mental bandwidth” has been appropriated for the cause, at least according to Google.  I suppose that this is nothing new, in that jargon and genres go hand in hand, but this is a success of dubious merit, the term having long been abused in the business and technical fields.

Because, you see, the original spirit of “bandwidth” was an inquiry into what happens when you shake something around, be it electrically, digitally, or mechanically. So in a literal sense, mental bandwidth could imply some insight as to what happens to your head if someone were to grab your shoulders and shake it at some fixed frequency while screaming, “Are you barking mad?”

Just because it’s possible to relate throughput to bandwidth does not mean that bandwidth is throughput, because that implies that any old system or construct has the sole purpose of passing information. Brains, particularly those belonging to panicked undergrad students staring down an exam, have been known to pass information at an obscene rate, but I recognize that they are most valuable when retaining and processing it.

On the real topic of watching a series or episode more than once, might I propose a more applicable term: Learning Curve. If you want to learn more about what you’ve seen, then you will climb it. Otherwise, garbage in, garbage out. Huge amount of bandwidth throughput in that case!

On a side note, buildings have bandwidth too. You can measure it by seeing how they react in an earthquake or strong winds. Try it out on yours today!

An intermission while I get off the music train.

Let me describe my feed reading habits. Most of the entries I see originate from feed aggregators. I may not read every single entry I come across, but I will at least scan headlines and read summaries to get a sense of what others are interested in.

In terms of anime and related topics, Anime Nano or the AB Antenna are go-to sources, but if you’ve ever subscribed to the full feeds of either, then you know that the unread post count can and does accumulate rapidly.

I’m subscribed to both.

I think you can see how this might be a problem, but it’s actually not too bad most of the time. In fact, it’s roughly only half bad. There’s a lot of overlap between the two feeds since many sites have been admitted to both, and it’s also probably a major reason why many pick just one of the two, if they pick one at all.

It would be useful to me — and perhaps others — if I could take a union of sorts, with the resultant being a new set with the entries of both but devoid of duplicates. I thought that, if nothing else, it would be a rudimentary study in web services programming.

So I wrote Antenna-Nano, which periodically polls both aggregators, and maintains a list of all unique entries within a 10 hour window. There are actually two feeds that do the exact same thing, one being the main site and the other being a FeedBurner feed that acts as a kludge-tastic cron service whenever it refreshes.

As a result, expect updates every 30 minutes. I’d prefer every 10 minutes, but I don’t have much of a case griping over free cron for a hobby project. I’m pretty happy with it otherwise.

Those of you with more experience than me (it wouldn’t take much) are probably pointing to Yahoo Pipes right now while scratching your heads over my choice of Google App Engine. Actually, I do have a Yahoo Pipes version and it is indeed very easy to do what I want, but the output is ugly for the sole reason that it has sketchy Unicode support.

It may have been fine even a year ago when most used only the 7-bit subset of UTF-8, but these days, more people are using a couple non-ASCII characters to decorate their titles and post descriptions. But it’s not just exotic characters that Yahoo Pipes has trouble with: I’ve even seen something as mundane as the apostrophe encoded into its 3-byte equivalent.

Going with a pipe is more elegant, though, and I did try to make it work, but the result was me subjecting myself to a day’s worth of Unicode hell as I tried to build a custom filter to de-Yahoo the data. We can discuss the sordid details if you’re so inclined, but in the end I found no workarounds.

I seem to be perpetually behind the curve, the result being that 3 weeks into the new year and the new season, I have one post in the pipeline, and it has nothing to do with any of the new shows. It’s not even that long in word count, but it’s taken about that long to distill all I wanted to say about Dennou Coil.

The upshot is that I’ll pretty much shut up about it afterwards. And then you can celebrate, and then there will be cake. Or something.

Oh I could put up something convenient to pass the time, except that I couldn’t. Maybe if pushed into a corner I could, but I guarantee that it would be an extremely upsetting experience for both the cornered and those who would dare experience the results.

The instances where there is something new on this site is like a blip in the background radiation, and I’m fine with that. My primary concern is to those who are fine with that, too. All 18 of you.

That said, I think I understand the rationale behind strictly episode summary entries: the authors have something to prove.

It’s why it can’t be really relegated to a forum, and the cold text comprising a bunch of episode counters on some list doesn’t cut it, either. Compared to a site, neither has as strong a sense of ownership. Whether someone else hosts it or not, the sense of freedom provided by having one’s “own” site makes it a lot more personal, even if the entries could belong to just about anyone else.

Maybe we’re already there, or otherwise will converge to a point where creating (or generating) these kinds of entries is about as easy as pushing a button, not unlike taking a digital picture. Rather than A going up to B and saying, “So what did you think of…?” it’s more like B making the first move and saying, “I just got back and I’ve got tons of pictures and a travelogue!” Making an entry does require an amount of initiative greater than zero.

But what’s really being said is, “I went there and I’ve got tons of pictures and a boatload of text to prove it.” No matter what you think about convincing the world of one’s viewing habits, it’s one of the most effective ways of getting the point across.

I don’t think earnest enthusiasm should ever be discounted. Without it, you wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t be here, no matter how easy things got.

The PBF is strong in this one.

While not as doomed as our hapless hero, I still think that numerous LOL moments will be had by my exam markers. While there wasn’t any cake at the finish line, music was fine too.

By way of apology, a semi-relevant entry is coming up. In fact, it may even be up as you read this.

Image link goes here.

I will be out of the loop - as opposed to being just out of it - for the next little bit.

I’m quite fond of that particular application of an NPN transistor. It reflects those enjoyable lab afternoons where nothing goes right for half of us. And it’s true! Taking the derivative and setting it to zero may be useful. At least writing stuff down may net you part marks. I’m keeping that in mind for the next five days.

Searching for streetcars in the darkness of winter’s day.