| Hi all |
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| 01:57am 26/04/2008 |
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I'm still here. No, I'm not planning to make this blog active again or start showing up logged in on Y!M and messenger, but there are many of you with whom I've only ever been in contact online. So I'm taking this chance to say hi to all of you. My email address is TripleElation at gmail and you're more than welcome.
I might as well drop a word about what's been up with me recently. In the few next weeks I have 2 physics exams, 1 math exam and two lectures to give - one about the Prisoner's Dilemma and one about the concept of infinity. And I'm not even a student yet. Mm, Busy busy. Hope all of you are having wonderful lives. |
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| Help |
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| 06:49am 23/08/2007 |
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Last night was all hazy and now my playlist is full of Richard Cheese lounge arrangements and Rockapella and I can't listen to anything else
oooo oooooo scooobaaa dooba doo doo dooo and she's buying a stairway to heaven tell me where in the world is carmen sandiego |
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| One of Us |
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| 03:26pm 17/08/2007 |
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What if God was crying?
What if God was lying in his lonely bed
Staring at the ceiling
Wishing he was somewhere else instead?
What if God was lonely?
What if God was only
Waiting for a call
Sorry for himself, feeling stupid, feeling small
Wishing he had never left at all
(with apologies to Joan Osborne and ABBA) |
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| Sliding down the Gaussian going WHEE |
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| 03:28pm 16/08/2007 |
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After four months of hard work, three hours of an exam and three weeks of nerve-wrecking anticipation, the results of the Psychometry, or the Israeli-SAT-Thing, or the SAT-Analogue (SATAN), or the whatchamachooseacallit- - are in, and they stand at 764 on a 200-800 scale. This is a standardized score over a normal distribution with a mean of 500 and a standard deviation of 100; The sum of the probability distribution up to that exact point yields the position of this score as being on approximately the 99.6th percentile, thus giving rise to a highly inappropriate yet not completely unsubstantiated response on my part, namely
HELL YEAH.
And a nod of appreciation to the 1-out-of-250 people who apparently are, yet still, more competent than I am in the exquisite art of ADHD-inspired thinking. |
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| We are a wacked out nation |
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| 11:50pm 19/07/2007 |
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The website of Yedioth Ahronoth, a major media outlet, runs a story about the imminent release of 256 Palestinian prisoners. Obviously this is a complicated issue and a case could be made for why this is a good idea, or why it isn't.
And what are the talkbacks about?
"LOL! It's a power of 2!" |
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| Robert Baden-Powell Was Clearly Evil |
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| 06:36pm 15/07/2007 |
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So prepare for the coup of the century
Be prepared for the murkiest scam
Meticulous planning
Tenacity spanning
Decades of denial
Is simply why I'll
Be king undisputed
Respected, saluted
And seen for the wonder I am
Yes, my teeth and ambitions are bared
BE PREPARED!
[All:]
Yes, our teeth and ambitions are bared
BE PREPARED! |
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| Shrek 3 |
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| 03:54pm 08/07/2007 |
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Okay, if you've seen it then you've already seen it, if you haven't seen it then you may want not to get spoiled, but.
Dude. SNOW WHITE'S LIMIT BREAK.
BAM! 99,999 DAMAGE! |
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| 10:12pm 25/06/2007 |
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Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.
Jim Guigli
Carmichael, CA
A retired mechanical designer for the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory is the winner of the 24th running of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. A resident of the Sacramento suburb of Carmichael, Guigli displayed appalling powers of invention by submitting sixty entries to the 2006 Contest, including one that has been "honored" in the Historical Fiction Category. "My motivation for entering the contest," he confesses, "was to find a constructive outlet for my dementia."
An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is the essence of simplicity: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for "The Last Days of Pompeii" (1834), which has been made into a movie three times, originating the expression "the pen is mightier than the sword," and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "pursuit of the almighty dollar," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."
The contest began in 1982 as a quiet campus affair, attracting only three submissions. This response being a thunderous success by academic standards, the contest went public the following year and ever since has annually attracted thousands of entries from all over the world.
While the Winner parodies hard-boiled detective fiction, the runner-up toys with perhaps the most famous piece of dialogue from Clint Eastwood's "Dirty Harry" movie. In keeping with the bignitude and high seriousness of the Contest, the Grand Prize winner will receive a pittance. Other winners must content themselves with becoming household names.
Runner-Up
"I know what you're thinking, punk," hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, "you're thinking, 'Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?' - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel loquacious?' - well do you, punk?"
Stuart Vasepuru
Edinburgh, Scotland
Full list of winners, runner-ups and honourable mentions here. |
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| My course instructor on digit substitution SAT questions |
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| 06:53pm 13/06/2007 |
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"What I want to illustrate here is that when you add up two numbers and the maximum number of digits one of them has is one less than the sum, the leftmost digit in the sum must be one. Consider the following:"
(he turns around and starts jotting on the blackboard)
R E M
+
E M F
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A C D C
(he then goes on to the rest of the explanation, which doesn't matter) |
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| A question to fellow touch typists |
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| 04:25am 04/06/2007 |
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Does your right hand /also/ go renegade and type words and letters that make a weird sort of sense, yet you have obviously not intended to write? With its access to letters such as I, N and G mine transforms nouns into verbs and adjectives into nouns with such hasty glee that I'm starting to wonder whether my left hemisphere needs some lessons in Stop, Collaborate, Listen.
This happens much more frequently when I'm tired. |
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| Splorg |
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| 07:25pm 16/05/2007 |
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Imaginary numbers resulted from forcefully widening a mathematical paradigm to accommodate new symmetries while losing any obvious connection the original system might have had with reality. Observe as I do the same to Logic itself.
Definition: 0 = false.
Definition: 1 = true.
Simple enough. Now I want to define a logical conjunction, i.e. what happens when you put two things on the two sides of the word "AND". How does that behave? Well, it's false if any of the two thingies on either side are false, and true otherwise. What function do we know that behaves this way with 0 and 1? Multiplication! so we define A and B <=> AB.
Now I want a NOT operation. What springs out a 1 if you plug in 0 and springs out a 0 if you plug in one? Why, the argument 1-X. So we define NOT A <=> 1-A.
Now I want an OR application, i.e. either one being true, or both. You can define that with NOT and AND. A OR B is true in any case except if both are not true, or in other words A OR B <=> NOT (NOT A & NOT B) <=> 1-(1-A)(1-B) <=> 1- (1-B-A+AB) <=> 1-1+B+A-AB <=> A+B-AB.
XOR (either true, but not both) will be left as an exercise for the reader. At any rate, that's not the point. The thing is that now you can suddenly turn on your original assumptions that A and B have to equal 1 or 0 and see what happens. One thing that comes to mind is to say that A and B might be fractions between 0 and 1; this results in single-handedly re-inventing probability theory. Handy. Irrational and Transcendental probability we already have (e.g. the probability of two random integers being coprime). So what's next in line?
NEGATIVE probability! Or, as I will call it for absolute lack of real-world analogue, truth value Splorg. Splorg events have a logical value of -1. Thus we have
TRUE and SPLORG = SPLORG
FALSE and SPLORG = FALSE
TRUE or SPLORG = TRUE
FALSE or SPLORG = SPLORG
SPLORG and SPLORG = TRUE
SPLORG or SPLORG = -3!
WTF is a -3?!
I experimented with the OR function and it quickly became apparent that once you assume Splorg probability, what springs into existence is an array of logical values that are not powers of two. As in, literally, values of X where 1-X = 2^n for some n. Obviously using the not function you can generate anything that is a power of 2 from this. The other two functions can then be used to create a gamut of freak logical values (I have no idea whether these encompass all the natural numbers or not, but I may attempt a proof one day when I shouldn't actually be studying for you-know-which-test).
Another consequence is that if you apply what we know about imaginary numbers to this, you can get a firm, mathematical grasp on the thus-far elusive concept of imaginary probability. For example, if the probability that any two given mutually exclusive events will happen is purely imaginary, then the probability of both happening is some degree of Splorg.
Similarly, if the probability of something is Purely imaginary, and the probability of something else is not merely imaginary but imaginary Splorg, both of them must inevitably happen.
Which explains a lot. |
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| A very belated playlist double take |
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| 06:27am 10/05/2007 |
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School's Out - A*Teens feat. Alice Cooper
...
Isn't that like something by Metallica feat. Britney Spears?
...though I probably would listen to that too. |
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