Tumblelog - 2008
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DAD: here, Billy, pet the nice turkey. KID: What, so we can kill it later. DAD: Not this one, Billy. KID: But we kill the others, one of its relatives. DAD: We don’t kill it, Billy. Someone kills it for us. KID: So we’re cowards? DAD: No. KID: Hypocrites? DAD: Okay, fuck it, we’re going to Six Flags.
From David Moss’s blog, http://reformedmascot.blogspot.com/2008/11/time-for-annual-turkey-pardoning.html
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I heard a new maths joke today:
A bar walks into a commutative algebraist.
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Classical composers who really get rhythm: - John Cage - Carl Vine - Conlon Nancarrow - György Ligeti - Olivier Messiaen? hm
Who else?
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Discovered at http://malamute.org/Stories:
“Bad Hair Day
I live in Australia and our summers get pretty hot! I bought my malamute 5 years ago as a birthday present and Mojo is the best present I have ever had. As malamutes are snow dogs and she was finding the 38 - 40 degrees Celsius summers unbearable I took her to the groomers this year and her shaved! Well I didn’t expect Mojo to get so embarrassed, and she wouldn’t come near me for 5 days. She’d go to sleep and wake up, look down at herself and jump up in fright as she didn’t recognize the body she was looking at! She has now gotten over her embarrassment and has gone back to her beautiful, happy self.”
This is odd, because everyone knows animals don’t have emotions :—)
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“coarse-graining … amounts to this: correct the counting … by including any state that is sufficiently close to the ones legitimately counted. … This is really one of the most deceitful artifices I have ever come across in theoretical physics. It is rather like being asked to count the number of people wearing bowler hats in a crowd and including in your count everyone standing next to someone wearing a bowler hat!” (Michael Redhead, From Physics to Metaphysics, Cambridge University Press 1995, p.31)
The sentiment is right but the analogy is a bit unfair. It’s more like including in your account everyone wearing a Trilby. (Because in coarse graining you include anything that’s close in the state space, and the state is the variable you’re interested in.)
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From http://blog.plover.com/math/right-skewed.html by Marc Dominus:
“Michael Lugo mentioned a while back that most distributions are normal. He does not, of course, believe any such silly thing, so please do not rush to correct him (or me). But the remark reminded me of how many people do seem to believe that most distributions are normal. More than once on internet mailing lists I have encountered people who ridiculed others for asserting that”nearly all x are above [or below] average”. This is a recurring joke on Prairie Home Companion, broadcast from the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” And indeed, they can’t all be above average. But they could nearly all be above average. And this is actually an extremely common situation.
To take my favorite example: nearly everyone has an above-average number of legs.”
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Here’s some Martin Luther King which I came across by accident via zenith’s LiveJournal blog:
“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’
… I had … hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: `An Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.’ Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely rational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively.”
Martin Luther King, letter from Birmingham Jail, 16/4/1963: http://www.futureofthebook.org/letterfrombirminghamjail/gravely-disappointed-with-the-white-moderate
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Street artist Banksy has produced the wonderful Village Pet Store And Charcoal Grill
“While New Yorkers have been consumed by the stock market meltdown, a tiny little pet store quietly opened four days ago at 89 7th Avenue between West 4th and Bleeker Street in the West Village of New York City.
There are no puppies or kittens in the windows here.
… McDonald’s Chicken Mc Nuggets sip barbecue sauce. A rabbit puts on her makeup. A CCTV camera nurtures its young.
… Once inside Banksy’s pet store, you discover such things as breaded fish that swim in a large round bowl while hot dogs are living the high life under heat lamps in cages near the cash register.”
http://www.woostercollective.com/2008/10/the_village_pet_store_and_charchoal_gril.html
There are videos at http://thevillagepetstoreandcharcoalgrill.com.
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From Live Journal user mindfulness (from http://community.livejournal.com/veganpeople/3276140.html, lightly edited):
“There’s a really old story about someone in Buddha’s sangha trying to make vegetarianism a rule for all Buddhists and Buddha declaring that’s not necessary. Necessary as it doesn’t contribute to enlightenment. I disagree as the harm farming animals causes includes a state of mind where we aren’t minimising harm. There’s a Mahayana Sutra that says vegetarianism is necessary. So there’s some disagreement which is reflected amongs Buddhist schools and individuals around the world. …
I think one reason Buddhism is ambiguous about meat eating is that monks in the past, and some in current times, lived off begging and it was rude to refuse what is offered. Which might explain the rule that you cannot ask someone to kill an animal for you. This makes me think Buddhism needs to evolve and some cultures brought that about, as by paying for meat you are effectively asking for it.”
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“Cymbolism is a new website that attempts to quantify the association between colors and words, making it simple for designers to choose the best colors for the desired emotional effect.”
Do I need to say why this is funny?
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From a locked post on a Live Journal friend’s blog (<<http://etomlef.livejournal.com):>>:>>) their thoughts on the animal tent at the Orange Fair. (This is Orange in Connecticut, not Orange in NSW.)
“thoughts on animal tent:
little glass case of newly hatched baby chicks. everyone was “OOOhing” and “AWWing” over their cute fluffy yellowness. wonder if most people know that their purchase of eggs supports an industry that grinds the male chicks alive and starves the hens for up to 3 weeks to induce faster laying.
13 year old girl petting a cow while eating a hamburger, i’m standing next to her, she says to her friend, “I LOVE COWS!” and i grin and say, “especially eating them, huh!?” she just stares at me and furrows her brow.
i got a kiss from a pig, the 5th smartest animal on the planet. nerds like me!!
other thoughts:
the oxen pull is fucked. you’re a dumb animal, your head is attached to your bro with a wooden harness like you’re in the medieval stocks, people are yelling on a loudspeaker, and some fuck with beater-burn is whipping the fuck out of your face so he can chain you to cement blocks and have you pull them in the hot sun.. all while people hoot and clap and eat steak subs. you flinch and moo and look nervous and sad, but all people say is, “what a beautiful animal! what power! and look how he controls them! oh my!” i felt particularly bad for one sad little pair that had whip marks all over their faces and sides. shit was positively antebellum, y’all.”
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Chris Wilcox has a tattoo which was designed in TeX.
For more details, see Chris. Literally.
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Why have I spent all these years using awkward syntax when I wanted to italicise a single word in TeX? It occurred to me yesterday that it’s a no-brainer to make the syntax really simple, and I do it zillions of times a day so it’s well worth having to remember the names of new macros.
Here we go (paste this into a TeX document):
\def\em #1 {\it #1\/ }
\def\b #1 {\bf #1 }
This is a \em test of some text.
This is \b another test. There are odd cases when this won’t get the spacing quite right, but you can always do those the old way.
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me: I should learn German.
Alison: That would be fun. Then we’d have a language in common.
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Someone on a vegan group asked about dietary cholesterol, and I thought it might be useful to post my reply here:
The amazing thing is that how much cholesterol you eat doesn’t matter! Well, unless you eat a really enormous amount, like much more than any reasonable vegan ever does.
What matters most is how much saturated fat you eat. In addition to getting a very small amount of cholesterol from the cholesterol you eat, your body turns a large amount of the saturated fat you eat into new cholesterol. That’s what matter most for your cholesterol level. (What matters most for your overall health is probably how much total fat you eat, but that’s another story.)
So why do foods have labels on them saying how much cholesterol they’ve got? Just because the food industry latched onto that as a way to sell more food. Not that they were being entirely dishonest. I expect some of them understood the science and some didn’t. Exactly how many did and how many didn’t would be guesswork.
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At last, it’s been experimentally verified that some macroscopic organisms can survive in open space. Hooray!
See http://xeny.net/PoetryofScienceCrittersInSpace.
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I’ve just discovered http://www.humanemyth.org.
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Rinalia took a photo and captioned it “Louise wondering if I might give her some food”.
I hope y’all realise that Louise is not really wondering, only moving her body in a way which we anthropomorphically interpret as wondering. Don’t worry, I’m joking. :—) You know how according to most people (or most people I meet, anyway), non-human animals are just like humans except that when humans do something it’s called thinking, believing etc, and when non-humans do exactly the same thing it’s called instinct? Makes me want to instinctively hit them over the head with something heavy.
See also: - http://rinalia.livejournal.com/307122.html?view=1368498#t1368498. - When I get around to it, I’m going to write a page (and maybe even a paper) called Anthropomorphism Schranthropomorphism.
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“Hockey Moms” were out in force for Sarah Palin last night … at least that’s the impression the Republicans wanted you to have. Last night, I went to the Republican National Convention mainly to see how it differed from festivities in Denver, and boy was it different. Probably one of the most notable things was the Republican use of “handmade” signs. You couldn’t enter the Xcel Center with a handmade sign, but that’s ok … when you got inside and got to a seat, there were handmade signs waiting for you.
http://rinalia.livejournal.com/308219.html (+ minor punctuation fixes)
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After bitspike (<<http://bitspike.livejournal.com)>>>>) stuffed up some HTML in a Live Journal post:
Jason: the only option is for you to restart your whole LJ.
bitspike: Then I will need new friends, too. I don’t want the current ones judging me for mistakes I made in this journal. Idea: We can carefully plan out journal conversations beforehand by email correspondence. Then we’ll both seem smart!
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Last week I was at dinner at the house of some lovely but omnivorous friends, who had kindly cooked vegan dishes for me and Alison but were eating meat as well.
Their meat was very dry, and they were complaining about it. Oh, if only they had some meat fat to baste it with, they were saying.
“I know where you could get some suitable fat,” I said. “Liposuction.”
Cheered me up no end.
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the Misanthropic Principle of cosmology
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I just came here to see whether I’d written anything since last time I looked.
It’s been a long day.
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Sunir Shar on blogs versus wikis:
“I have a new appreciation for blogging. I have come around to seeing how blogging is superior to wikis for efficiently participating in a conversation with other people, even though the conversation never coalesces on importance. Joining a conversation is way more important because it’s necessary to Personal Relationships, which are more important than actual truth. Twitter is amazing for this because it strips away the pretense of saying anything important. You just have to be saying something to somebody.
I think it’s interesting that blogs out-perform wikis for conversations and relationship-building because blogs rely heavily on the technical infrastructure built up around them in order to support conversations, whereas wikis seem to only thrive when the participants focus heavily on the network of Personal Relationships between themselves. Looking back at this outcome, I have shifted my belief that culture is more powerful than form.
It’s not that I don’t think a strong culture will dominate any form. It’s just that I now think of the expense of culture. The cost of maintaining a culture is so high, the most effective approach is to solidify culture in external artifacts that represent what was previously embedded in the relationships between people and the people themselves.”
http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SunirShah
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“Stigler’s Law … No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.”
Stephen M. Stigler, `Statistics on the Table’, Cambridge MA and London: Harvard UP, 1999, p.277
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Thanks to John Hurst from Monash Uni for this true story:
Hey! I had a streaker in my FIT2022 lecture today (12-1).
I was happily into the gruesome bits of stack frames, pushing and popping return addresses, parameters, etc, with a slide entitled “Stack Growth in Procedure Calls” when the door burst open, and this male streaker ran through the lecture theatre, up the stairs and out the back door. He was shouting about something going on somewhere, but I don’t think many students were taking much notice of the mouth end of his anatomy.
He disappeared as quickly as he appeared, and to rescue all the jaws from the desks, I quipped “Well! I didn’t see much stack growth there!” - which drew one of the biggest laughs I’ve had for many a while …
cheers,
—John Hurst
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Just won an auction on eBay for 1/30th of my maximum bid :-)
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Wonderful short absurdist comic: http://bustedwonder.com/exterminus/
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I’ve been bad about keeping Work In Progress up to date recently, but I’ve finally put something new there: Likelihood Principle Handbook Chapter. 16/7/2008
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My photo gallery has some new photos of the alpacas with my nieces, and a new, friendlier address: http://non-human.people.xeny.net
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Casper:
http://images.icanhascheezburger.com/completestore/2008/7/15/thesgrapesrre128606350695387338.jpg
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http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/funny-pictures-human-apologizes-to-panda.jpg
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News story written by Associated Press and spotted by Chris Cléirigh:
When Yosuke the parrot flew out of his cage and got lost, he did exactly what he had been taught — recite his name and address to a stranger willing to help.
Police rescued the African grey parrot two weeks ago from a neighbor’s roof in the city of Nagareyama, near Tokyo. After spending a night at the station, he was transferred to a nearby veterinary hospital while police searched for clues, local policeman Shinjiro Uemura said.
He kept mum with the cops, but began chatting after a few days with the vet.
“I’m Mr. Yosuke Nakamura,” the bird told the veterinarian, according to Uemura. The parrot also provided his full home address, down to the street number, and even entertained the hospital staff by singing songs.
“We checked the address, and what do you know, a Nakamura family really lived there. So we told them we’ve found Yosuke,” Uemura said.
The Nakamura family told police they had been teaching the bird its name and address for about two years.
But Yosuke apparently wasn’t keen on opening up to police officials.
“I tried to be friendly and talked to him, but he completely ignored me,” Uemura said.
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Joe Neeman has kindly given me permission to post the documentation for one of my favourite programming languages, Homespring. 2/5/2008
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Everyone’s talking about PZ Myers getting kicked out of an anti-evolution film recently while his guest, Richard Dawkins, was allowed in.
Sean Carroll has a terrific analysis of why PZ Myers should not worry about creating publicity for the creationism loonys. http://cosmicvariance.com/2008/03/23/politicians-and-critics
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Jeremy Bentham was a dude. How about this?
- “By the word paraphrasis may be designated that sort of exposition which may be afforded by transmuting into a proposition, having for its subject some real entity, a proposition which has not for its subject any other than a fictitious entity”
Doesn’t that sound just like what Russell’s supposed to have invented 70 years after Bentham died?
Citation: Jeremy Bentham, “Essay on Logic”, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. J. Bowring, Edinburgh, 1843, Vol. 8, pp. 213—293 (p. 246), quoted in Michael Beaney, “The Analytic Turn in Early Twentieth-Century Philosophy”, in Michael Beaney, ed., The Analytic Turn, London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 1—30.
Another thing I’ve just discovered is another very early utilitarian who believed in animal welfare (as Bentham did), namely … amazingly … Bolzano! OK, that won’t be amazing to everyone, but Bolzano is mainly famous as a mathematician, e.g. for the Bolzano-Weierstrass Theorem.
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Funniest thing I’ve read for ages: geologists filmed for a reality TV show, written up by John Wilkins:
http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2008/03/just_so_we_know_who_were_talki.php
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I wish someone would write the perfect word processing system. Word sucks the most, but sometimes TeX sucks too.
After years of using TeX to make lecture slides, I’ve only just found out why my small text usually comes out widely spaced. Apparently you’re not meant to usewith multiple fonts. Did you know that?
(See Tex Scrapbook if you’re interested in the details, including what to do about it.)
Funnily enough, just a couple of hours after writing that, I came across what looks like a rational successor to TeX. It’s called “ant” (“ant is not TeX”). See http://ant.berlios.de. I haven’t got time to learn how to use it, sadly.
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Principia Mathematica is online in a searchable format. My god. (<<http://decenturl.com/quod.lib.umich/principia)>>>>)
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Why I Am Not On Facebook Any More
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’ǝɯıʇ uı ʇxǝʇ ɹnoʎ ǝsɹǝʌǝɹ oʇ looʇ ɐ :ʇxǝu ƃuıɯoɔ ’spuǝıɹɟ ɹnoʎ ʎouuɐ ˙<<http://www.revfad.com/flip.html>> ǝǝs ’ɟlǝsɹnoʎ sıɥʇ op oʇ ʇuɐʍ noʎ ɟı ˙ǝpoɔıun ɟo sɹǝpuoʍ ǝɥʇ oʇ sʞuɐɥʇ ǝʇıs qǝʍ ɹnoʎ uo ʇxǝʇ uʍop-ǝpısdn (ʎpıʇun ɹǝɥʇɐɹ) ǝʌɐɥ uɐɔ noʎ ʇnq ’ʇı ʇnoqɐ ʍouʞ ʎpɐǝɹlɐ ʎɐɯ noʎ puɐ ’ʇuɐʇɹodɯı ʎlʇɔɐxǝ ʇou sı sıɥʇ
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#Asymptotics I’m getting increasingly cranky about statistics textbooks which write
lim (x→∞) [a - b] = 0and then explain that this means that as x increases a “gets closer and closer to” b (actual quote; citation omitted to protect the guilty). Of course it doesn’t mean that!
At least, it doesn’t mean that in general (and meaning things in general is, er, meant to be the whole point of maths). It does in the examples the author has in mind, but if that’s what the author wants to say then the mathematics that goes into proving the asymptotic result is irrelevant. The best one can say, if all one has is the asymptotic result, is that it’s a clue that for actual values of x, as x increases, a is likely to get closer and closer to b. It’s only above some large value of x, unknown, that a is guaranteed to get closer to b.
Elsewhere I’m rebutting this sort of thing in detail for a couple of specific cases (unbiasedness and consistency of estimators, in case you’re interested, both of which have asymptotic definitions). But I’m cranky about almost all asymptotic definitions in statistics, not just those two. And maybe almost all asymptotic definitions in applied maths, come to think of it.
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Here’s an interesting new open-access journal: Rejecta Mathematica (http://math.rejecta.org)..)
And for anyone who cares about programming languages: an interesting new implementation of Smalltalk at http://code.google.com/p/syx. Free and open source (unlike most of them), available from the command line (unlike Squeak), and hopefully less buggy than GNU Smalltalk.
And a beautifully simple advent calendar at http://isitchristmas.com.
“One of the things about progressing through life is you can start crossing out the things you won’t be. You keep crossing them out until the only thing left is corpse.” Richard Jackson at http://richardjackson.org/?p=198 5/12/2007
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I guess entries have to go backwards — i.e., up the page. Otherwise, anyone who reads this (if anyone does) will always be starting by reading old entries. Hm. Well, that’s how other tumblelogs seem to do it.
#Hooray for Danya Alexeyevsky For years, my wiki program — the one which runs this site — has only worked with an old version of the Io programming language, which has lead to various problems. Now you may think that nobody reads this site (that’s sort of a joke), but Danya Alexeyevsky not only reads it but has massively improved it by updating the program to work with the latest version of Io. Or at least, they’ve done that with a slightly old version of my program (my fault: I hadn’t made the latest version available), but now that Danya’s done the hard part it will be relatively easy to get the latest version of my program working with the latest version of Io, and then everything will be good.
One day there might even be more than one site using this program. And that might be a good thing, because even though I’m one of the world’s crappest programmers I think I’ve got the design of this wiki (by which I really mean its feature set) just about right. And it’s a small program, so it shouldn’t be hard to get most of the bugs out later.
More about my program: Io Wiki. More about Io: http://iolanguage.com.
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I’ve forgotten what I wanted to write in my first entry. Although here’s something else to write instead:
#Tags
“I have yet to find something textual using a tag that I wouldn’t have found faster using Google. In fact I sometimes Google my del.icio.us bookmarks rather than try to figure out what tag I used.”
Nicholas Fitzroy-Dale, <<http://flonk.lardcave.net.>> 29/11/2007
Tags: tagging, grumpy