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Japan in 2 days!
Reading List
The Cyberiad - Stanislaw Lem
Post Command - Patrick O'Brian
After Hours - Edwin Torres
Dog Soldiers - Robert Stone
The Milagro Beanfield War - Nichols
Hard-Boiled Wonderland - Haruki Murakami

Things I won't miss at all:
football
hot dogs and hamburgers
driving
people yelling at their kids in public

Things I will miss is not yet determined. Probably a lot.

Simcoe's back
Here's a question for you simcoe: is there such a thing as a secondary placebo effect? what I mean by that is this:

the placebo effect is pretty well known now, and if I were in a study i'd surely try to figure out which group I was in. If I had a medicine that had an obvious effect (drowsiness, sneezing, etc.) i'd believe I was in the test group, and would answer truthfully, while if i imagined I was in the control group i'd minimize my reports to avoid appearing stupid. To test for this, here's my proposition: give people medicine and tell them it's for allergy relief. the control group gets a placebo, and the test group gets a placebo which has an added ingredient with an obvious effect, but one which has no actual effect on allergies. I bet the group that got the more noticable placebo would report more relief.

the reason this is interesting is because if a medicine came out that has lots of side effects, it would probably appear more effective in studies. This ties into the belief that medicine has to be harsh to work... Anyway, do you know any studies that have tested this?

ACLU vs. Propaganda

WASHINGTON -- The American Civil Liberties Union today applauded Congress for investigating the federal government's insertion of propaganda into popular television sit-coms and dramas.

"The government not only acted unconstitutionally when it sought to alter the content of television programming," said Marvin Johnson, an ACLU Legislative Counsel. "It -- together with the networks -- violated the public's trust by engaging in an unethical propaganda campaign."

Japan in 5 days
I'm leaving this saturday, and I've also been posessed by the EVIL, EVIL game diablo 2.
Monday, July 10, 2000

4 dimensional visualization:
imagine a circle passing through a line. Imagine what it looks like from inside the line. At first, the edge of the circle looks like a point. Then they see a line that grows longer, then shrinks to a point and disappears.

Next imagine a sphere passing through a plane. first it's a point, then it's a circle that grows and shrinks and disappears.

Now what would a 4-ball (hypersphere) look like if it passed through our 3 dimensional space? It'd be a point that would grow into a sphere and shrink again to nothing. I like that.

Thanks peter ketterer, you told me that in 8th grade.
Wednesday, July 5, 2000

Assonance, Alliteration, and Consonance

wild and wooly	tried and true	first and foremost
fish or fowl	safe and sound	rime or reason
mad as a hatter	time out of mind	free and easy
slapdash	odds and ends	short and sweet
a stroke of luck	struts and frets	footloose and fancy-free
penny wise, pound foolish	thick and thing	kith and kin
alas and alack	fit as a fiddle	crisscross
last but not least	lone and lorn	good as gold
dead as a doornail	might and main	sink or swim
do or die	pell-mell	helter-skelter
harum-scarum	hocus-pocus	hibbity-jibbity
catty-corner	abracadabra	supercalifragilistic-expealidocious

Wednesday, July 5, 2000

some conversions
1 meter / second = 2.237 mph - this is useful if you are driving. you can figure out how fast someone's going by how fast they're gaining on you.
1 light nanosecond = 1 foot - this is a nice coincidence.
3.15e7 seconds = 1 year
5.88e12 miles = 1 light year
640 acres = 1 mile
1 acre ~ 210 feet on a side, or exactly 198 by 220 feet - acres are one of the most ridiculous units of measurement. they can't be rational squares, they have to be rectangular.
The USA has 3.7e6 square miles - this is useful for perspective when news reporters say "oh my god, 1000 acres has burned up!". It's only ~1 square mile out of 3.7 million in the US...
1 inch = 2.54 cm
28 grams = 1 oz - ha ha
35 oz = 1 kilo

Metric Time

A really well-thought-out proposal for Metric time, drowned among the eccentric:

The time system that you are used to (24hr/day) will be referred to here as Anglo-Babylonian Time

But time, that half-dimension that remained after DANIEL counted steps two-dimensionally on the horizontal plane, and weighed the vertical climb, then divided forward-going-only time into future and past, dividing distance by time to get travel speed rate - count, count, weigh, divide, he explained in his story of the writing on the wall [REF: MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN]....

40 kilohesits is one day; a hesit is h=2.16 seconds. [h=2.160000055 seconds (*), accounting for 0.37 leap hesit per year] A kilohesit is kh=36 minutes, slightly more than a half-hour, convenient for television schedules, and schools which take 2 or 3 per period: a kilohesit is nomenclatured, the demur [linger, delay], or [metric] dem(i)hour/uhr/heure [German half-clock; French half-hour].

Kermetric time is a concept that divides the 24 hour day into 100 equal parts called Kermits. Each Kermit is equivalent to 14.4 minutes; ie (24 hours x 60 minutes/hour )/100). More precise time can be counted by dividing by 1000 or even 10000 but in 1983 life was not as hectic and 14.4 minutes or 1 Kermit was accurate enough for most people.

If we ever make it into space hopefully there'll be a chance to switch over: Metric time on mars: (sane)

metric time was actually tried??

During the Revolution, the French tried to reenforce the 12 months/ 360 days - year, using a decimal timescale, adding 5 days of festivities at the end of the year. A day consisted of 10 hours of 100 minutes. Minutes were devided in 100 seconds. 10 days made a "week", called a "dekade". There were 30 days in a month. The republican calendar was not a succes and lasted only from 1793 till 1805.

Military Alphabets

The Standard:
Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Echo Foxtrot Golf Hotel India Juliet Kilo Lima Mike November Oscar Papa Quebec Romeo Sierra Tango Uniform Victor Whiskey Xray Yankee Zulu

British Army 1927:
Ack Beer Charlie Don Edward Freddy George Harry Ink Johnnie King London Monkey Nuts Orange Pip Queen Robert Sugar Toc Uncle Vic William X-ray Yorker Zebra

Spanish
Antonio Barcelona Carmen Chocolate Dolores Enrique Francia Gerona Historia Ine's Jose' Kilo Lorenzo Llobregat Madrid Navarra N~on~o Oviedo Pari's Querido Ramo'n Sa'bado Tarragona Ulises Valencia Washington Xiquena Yegua Zaragoza

Russian
Aleksej Boris Vasilij Grigorij Dmitrij Elena Zhenja Zoya Ivan Ivan_Kratkij Kilowatt Leonid Maria Nikolai Olga Pavel Roman Sergej Tatjana Uljana Fjodor Hariton Zaplja Chelovek Shura Schuka Tviordiy_Znak Igrek Miagkiy_Znak Emilija Yuri Jakow

A bat flew into my room last night as I was falling asleep. I heard my bamboo stick creaking, and turned on the light to see it flying in an 8 foot circle around my room, trying to find a spot to land. It couldn't find any. I wanted to get my camera, but I didn't want it to bump into me. Eventually it flew out the window.

also, I took about 50 pictures from the driver's seat of my car as I was stopped at red lights. Some of them came out well. That's the beauty of digital cameras, you can take many crappy pictures.

I started downloading the complete Hobbit, read by J.R.R. Tolkien. There are various versions on napster, but most of them are either not read by him or are weird radio play versions. There are now tons of non-napster run napster protocol servers. Napigator lets you control which server you connect to, and connect to non-official servers, which are going to be the only ones left around once Napster gets shut down. Anybody wanna take bets on how long they'll last? I give them one year more max. Also, naphoria appears to be a good (very unofficial) napster news site covering other mods and stuff.

Finally, just wanted to mention that I'm in DSL hell, along with many other webloggers. The line's been in for 3 (Three) months and techies from Rhythms and ConcentricDSL have been here at least 4 or 5 times, along with bell atlantic 3 times. As far as I can tell they're all liars or incompetent, and mostly both. I think they should just give us our money back, they've already spent at least $1000 trying to fix us just in wages. Judging from the shoddy treatment we've received I am astounded that they're even in business anymore.

Fun with time

When a friend asks you what time it is, say, "Time to take off my watch and put it in my pocket." Then take off your watch and put it in your pocket.

Betting on the results of science!

"Many bottles of the finest champagnes and malt whiskies, and even more esoteric stakes, rest in abeyance while observers struggle to count rare photons from remote galaxies,"...

For decades at the old Bell Laboratories (now part of Lucent Technologies) in New Jersey, a betting "book" lay in the tearoom, where scientists gathered for discussions each day at 4 P.M., recalled Dr. Pierre Hohenberg, a physicist who is now a deputy provost at Yale University. "A few of us were ideologically inclined to say that arguments should end up with a bet," Dr. Hohenberg said. "Talk is cheap."...

Christopher Wren, the English architect and scientist, announced in 1684 that he would give a book worth 40 shillings to anyone who, within two months, could deduce Kepler's laws from the inverse-square law that says the Sun's gravity decreases with the square of the planet's distance from the Sun. Isaac Newton's paper on his solution grew into his Principia, the tract that became a cornerstone of modern physics.

Imagine that we get in radio contact with intelligent aliens from, say, the Planet of the Apes. With painstaking effort we establish a common language and end up in a state of good communication. One of the things that we want to communicate is the difference between left and right. It turns out that the only way to do this is to use the violation of mirror symmetry by weak interactions. So, we can have the aliens construct an apparatus like Madame Wu used in her classic experiment, and with that it is possible to define right and left.

However, if they are in an antimatter part of the universe, their anti-Madame Wu apparatus will get the definition backwards. So, if we set up a face to face meeting with the aliens and, having told them about some of our customs, when we meet they want to shake hands with us and extend their left hand, we better run!

A high school picture of Richard Feynman
Are physicists cuter than mathematicians? My girlfriend loves Richard Feynman, she was so excited to see this picture. Is it me, or can you just see brilliance in his eyes?

I'd like to take the following test: high school pictures of prominent mathematicians (none of whom I recognize) would be mixed in with pictures of people who became businessmen, doctors, etc. Would people be able to pick out the future math-heads? would mathematicians be better at picking them out? They'd have to be picked from an old era where the hairstyles wouldn't give them away, and they'd have to be all wearing the same thing. Even still, I think I could pick them out.
Monday, June 26, 2000

3 weeks until japan!
fyi, i'm leaving july 15th for a year in Kochi, Japan. I'll attempt to keep updating this, and also i'm going to have to find a place to put all the pictures I take while I'm there. It'll be a year of learning japanese, trying to make 1-dan in go, and meeting a bunch of kids and trying to teach them english.
Monday, June 26, 2000

An interview with John Conway

Conway stroked his beard as he thought. "When I was a student at Cambridge, I used to go to a small coffee shop and do anagram crosswords. One day a procession came in, and one woman was carrying a fake daffodil - and it only had five petals. There have to be six! It made me rather annoyed; I guess that it shouldn't have." He smiled. "You know, there is a beauty in nature that is too subtle for man. It really bothers me that when artists paint a pineapple, they always make the lines symmetric. They aren't symmetric, and that's the real beauty of the thing. The asymmetry is related to the Fibonacci sequence - there might be eight grooves in one direction, and thirteen in the other, so the lines don't meet symmetrically. And artists ignore this. Another thing that nobody notices is a brick wall." Six months ago, he had gone through a 'brick wall' phase, which culminated in his giving a lecture called 'How to stare at a brick wall.' He described, in detail, the enormous variety of intricate patterns that can be found in brick walls. "And nobody looks at these damn things!"

audioactive sequences
1, 11, 21, 1211, 111221, 312211, 13112221
what's the sequence?

It's the audioactive sequence! each term is a description of the previous one. Some amazing work has been done on this sequence by John Conway. Apparently any group of 1s, 2s, or 3s eventually decomposes into a combination of 92 "elements" which never overlap again. There is a list of the elements, as well as a nice graph of them.
Sunday, June 25, 2000