Newsgroups: geometry.puzzles From: haoyuep@aol.com (Dan Hoey) Date: Sat, 1 Jan 2005 23:18:29 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: problem 726 On 29 Dec 04 21:36:49 -0500 (EST), Zak Seidov wrote: >1. In general, when areas of ADEF and of ABC are not equal >(but still DE || BC) ... >2. If we take that S_ADEF = S_BCF (but DE is NOT parallel to BC) >then we have another interesting problem.... Just for variety, we can consider the general problem of a triangle ABC with D on AB, E on AC, and F the intersection of BE and CD. Let the areas of ADFE, DBF, EFC, and FBC be denoted w, x, y, z. It looks to me like we can achieve any quadruple of nonnegative values such that wz^2 = xy(w+x+y+2z). The case w=z is w^3 = xy(3w+x+y) by straightforward substitution. The case DE || BC is x=y, and the equation throws off a factor of x+z, yielding wz = (w+2x)x . Dan --- Newsgroups: geometry.puzzles From: haoyuep@aol.com (Dan Hoey) Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 13:31:47 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: Generalization of the Pythagorean Theorem? WH wrote: >Zak Seidov wrote: >> "Generalization" of the Pythagorean Theorem? >>I'm not sure that this is suitable as New Year joke... but, >>For a right triangle ABC, with right angle C, >>the area of regular triangle ABC' >>built on AB (hypotenuse) >>equals to sum of area of regular triangle BCA' >>built on leg BC and >>area of regular triangle ACB' >>built on leg AB: >>S_ABC'=S_BCA'+S_ACB'. >> *A >> ^ |\+ ++ >> ^ | \ ++ >> ^ | \ + * C' >> B'* | \ + >> ^ | \ + >> ^ | \ + >> ^ |______\+ >> C B >> - - >> - - >> * A' [...] >>"Regular triangles" may be replaced by any >>"regular polygones" >>or even by any similar figures, [...] >Note that it can also be replaced with semicircles on each leg !! Most importantly, the triangles can be replaced by triangles similar to the original right triangle: +. /|\`-. / | \ `-. / | \ `-. / | \ /`-. /. | \ `-/ / / | \ / `-. |_ \ / `-|_|_____\/ `-. -./ `-./ and these triangles can then be reflected into the interior of the original triangle, yielding the neatest proof of the Pythagorean theorem I've ever seen. Perhaps that's what Zak meant by a "New Year joke". Dan Hoey haoyuep@aol.com --- Newsgroups: geometry.puzzles From: haoyuep@aol.com (Dan Hoey) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 01:43:37 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: Rectangle-to-4-similar-triangles-puzzle Bill Smythe wrote: >John Berglund wrote: >> It is possible for all rectangles. Cut along the >> diagonal, forming two right triangles. Any right >> triangle may be split into two similar smaller >> triangles. So keep splitting until you reach the >> desired number of pieces. >If the desired number is 4 (as in the original problem), then the >above would work for any rectangle EXCEPT a square. A square >would violate the "not all equal" clause of the original problem. It won't violate that clause if you are always careful to split one of the smallest triangles: +---+---+ |`. | .'| | `+' | | .' | +'------+ The only open question left here is the smallest number of similar triangles into which you can split a square, such that _no two are equal_. I thought I had five, but it doesn't look like it works. I'm pretty sure seven is possible. But I can't even prove that four is impossible! Dan Hoey haoyuep@aol.com --- Newsgroups: geometry.puzzles From: haoyuep@aol.com (Dan Hoey) Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2005 19:23:07 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: Cut square to similar unequal triangles Zak Seidov wrote: > Sorry, I missed Bill's and Dan's messages... > Any rectangle can be cut to 3 (and any more) > similar unequal triangles, > so square can be cut to six similar unequal triangles: > http://www.geocities.com/zseidov/Sq-6tris.html In that diagram, you cut the square into two unequal rectangles, then you cut each rectangle into three similar triangles. But the triangles of one rectangle are not similar to the triangles of the other. So can anyone beat seven, or show four impossible? Dan --- Newsgroups: geometry.puzzles From: haoyuep@aol.com (Dan Hoey) Date: Fri, 7 Jan 2005 17:34:59 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: Rectangle-to-4-similar-triangles-puzzle On Fri, 7 Jan 2005 13:37:56 +0000 (UTC), Bill Smythe wrote: >It seems to me that, in the case of a square, the method you >suggest can never leave you with no two triangles equal. Certainly. That does not deny any claim I intended to make. The original problem was to divide a rectangle into similar triangles so that not all the triangles were equal. The method you refer to, of dividing the rectangle into two equal triangles and subdividing triangles, was suggested by John Berglund, not me. I described to you how it would solve the original problem when the rectangle is a square. In the message you quoted, I wrote: > The only open question left here is the smallest number of similar > triangles into which you can split a square, such that _no two > are equal_.... This is a new problem. I proposed it only for a square, since John Berglund's method can produce a pairwise unequal dissection of any non-square rectangle. It is true that his method does not solve this new problem for a square, for exactly the reason you observe above. I know of a seven-triangle solution for the new problem. I think I can prove that it can't be done with three triangles. Any results that narrow the bounds would be appreciated. Dan --- Newsgroups: geometry.puzzles From: haoyuep@aol.com (Dan Hoey) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 02:07:23 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: Rectangle-to-4-similar-triangles-puzzle John Berglund wrote: >I came up with a 7 piece solution. Dan, is it the same solution that >you got? >_______________ >|\ | /\___ | >| \ |/_____\| >| | | /| >| | | / | >| \ | / | >| \|/ | >| / | >| / | >|/____________| >The ratio of the legs of the triangle are around 1 to 0.750397. Are you sure? I get a ratio of 0.7998475. Startlingly close to 0.8, but not quite. I hope I interpreted your drawing right--here's a slightly higher resolution graphic. +------+--+-------+ |\ | / `-. | | \ |/ `-. | | \ +----------+ | \ | .-'| | \ | .-' | | \| .-' | | +' | | .-' | |.-' | +-----------------+ My seven triangle solution is different, though somewhat boring: +------+----+---+ |\ |\ |\ | | \ | \ | \ | | \ | \ | \| | \ | \| .+ | \ | +-' | | \| .-' | | .+' | | .-' | +---------------+ The leg ratio can be 0.8260313 or 0.868837 . Dan Hoey haoyuep@aol.com --- Newsgroups: geometry.puzzles From: haoyuep@aol.com (Dan Hoey) Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 20:40:58 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: Rectangle-to-4-similar-triangles-puzzle John Berglund wrote: >Dividing a square into similar, non-congruent triangles. I still >get a ratio of 1 to 0.750397 for my arrangement. And yes this was >the plan: >+------+--+-------+ >|\ | / `-. | >| \ |/ `-. | >| \ +----------+ >| \ | .-'| >| \ | .-' | >| \| .-' | >| +' | >| .-' | >|.-' | >+-----------------+ My fault. I mistakenly used the ratio of long leg to hypotenuse, 1/sqrt(1-.750397^2) = .7998475. It's interesting that if you use a 3:4:5 right triangle, you get a rectangle with aspect ratio 768/769. >Another question - how many right isosceles triangles must you >divide a square into if none may be congruent? Is this even >possible? Good question. Also consider similar triangles with no right angle. Dan --- Newsgroups: rec.games.abstract From: Dan Hoey Date: 11 Jan 2005 17:13:02 -0500 Subject: Re: Peg solitaire and branching factor torb...@diku.dk writes: > king...@freemail.it (lucas) writes: > > i need a (good) bound to the maximum branching factor in peg > > solitaire game. Torben conjectured that a board with area S can have at most (4/3)S moves. I supply a proof. This is a rough paraphrase of Torben's argument. Suppose the board has area S, consisting of P pegs and H empty holes. If there are M possible moves, then the average number of ways any given peg can move is M/P, and the average number of ways of moving into each hole is M/H. If we can bound M/P <= a, M/H <= b, then M <= a P, M <= b H, so M(a+b) <= a b (P+H) = a b S, so M <= (a b / (a+b)) S . For instance, each peg can jump at most four ways and each hole can be filled at most four ways, so with a=b=4, M <= 2 S. Torben notes that the average M/P cannot achieve 4, and conjectures that the average approaches 2. This is the only part that needs proof: Let R_n be the number of horizontal rows of n adjacent pegs, bounded on the sides by holes or the edge of the board. We count the number of ways of horizontally: Rows of one peg can't jump, and every other row can jump at most two ways: the second from the left jumping left and the second from the right jumping right. So the number of possible horizontal jumps is at most 2 R_2 + 2 R_3 + 2 R_4 + ... <= P, by averaging. Similarly, the number of vertical jumps is at most P. Therefore M <= 2 P. This yields the inequalities M <= 2P, M <= 4H, whence M <= (4/3)S, as Torben conjectured. The inequalities can be made strict by noting that there are holes or peg-rows at the edges of the board that cannot achieve the bounds. Dan Hoey --- Newsgroups: geometry.research From: haoyuep@aol.com (Dan Hoey) Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2005 18:05:35 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: a problem David Eppstein wrote: > Dan Hoey wrote: >> N. Silver wrote: >>> DavidG wrote: >>>> Imagine an irregular polygon that contains several points. >>>> I would like to find the coordinates of the points that form >>>> a second polygon that is completely contained within the >>>> first polygon, such that this second polygon has maximum >>>> area. Is there an algorithm that can perform this task? >>> I must be missing something.... >> The way I understand the problem, we require the second polygon's >> vertices to be a subset of a given finite set of points. If the >> first polygon is convex, the answer is the convex hull of the point >> set. If not, I wouldn't be surprised if this is NP-hard. >If the first polygon has no holes, I think the answer is the >relative convex hull (a Google search on that phrase will turn >up useful references).... No, because some of the vertices of the relative convex hull may be vertices of enclosing polygon, rather than belonging to the given set of candidate vertices. That may be what DavidG had in mind, though. Dan Hoey haoyuep@aol.com --- Making Light: Open thread 35 ::: January 12, 2005, 05:07 PM Jonathan Vos Post: If the answer would be too long or too technical, I would NOT post it here, but put it somewhere else, or request that the person who queried contact me by email. But how would you tell that it was too long or too technical? Oh, well, I guess you're learning. This reminds me that I once mentioned the inverse Wythoff array, and suggested that anyone who wanted to know more send me e-mail. The followup from JVP failed to convince me of sufficient interest among the readership of Making Light and did not include a usable e-mail address. In case the top of this message is hard to decipher, my e-mail address is haoyuep@aol.com, which might be useful for anyone who looking for an effective way of requesting more information. Yow, am I huffy yet? --- Making Light: Displaced advice, and other sorts ::: January 14, 2005, 07:53 PM Just to say that I hope you write it, under whatever title, on whatever topic. Making Book is still great, and I still want more. As for Alternately, I could just keep working at editing books. After all, it's my job. yes, keep your day job--it's greatly appreciated on both sides of the industry--but don't let it eat your life. The books you edit are wonderful, but someone else can edit some of them. No one else can write a word of your writing, and you really shine at a somewhat longer length than we see in Making Light. To acknowledge Beth's comment, which I hope doesn't render this one completely superfluous--I'll give up my pony, too. I'll have a harder time coping if you let Making Light slide a bit, but I'll grit and bear it. --- Making Light: Open Thread 36 ::: February 07, 2005, 06:48 PM Bruce Durocher II: I heard a report this week on "This American Life" which involved a convention for romance writers and on romance writing.... The reporter made a small fuss over how everyone there was so supportive, and how the high proportion of women in the field must be a big part of the reason. I thought the reporter or interviewee also attributed this to the high demand for romance novels. Anyway, I was a little suspicious of the whole "romance publishers are so much more supportive than other houses" bit. It sounds too much like the publishing myths we see about how you need an agent/lying cover letter/bribe to get published by a traditional publisher. The antithesis used in contrast to the openness of romance publishers was Doubleday. Does anyone know if they have a particularly impermeable transom? My hypothesis for the abundance of support and cameraderie is that this was a convention, which has at least two effects. First, the writers and editors have more pleasant concerns than the usual empty mailbox and towering slush pile, respectively. Second, they are face-to-face, where each will better enjoy conversational topics other than the evils of the other. --- Making Light: Open Thread 36 ::: February 09, 2005, 10:29 AM On phishing, the Schmoo group describes a new kind of link spoofing method using homographs, also described by Gabrilovich and Gontmakher. On an entirely unrelated topic, I can't resist touting this marvelous lecture on the history of the wikipedia heavy metal umlaut page. Both found in Thane Plambeck's blog, full of linkalicious particulate matter. --- Making Light: Confession ::: February 10, 2005, 05:35 PM Not all that we hunger for is lost: I gaze upon him with little fear, even though my eyes swell with tears, which transform into perfectly-shaped scarlet emeralds, as they fall from many faucets to the ground, dancing upon the stone. --- Making Light: Confession ::: February 10, 2005, 05:46 PM A.R.Yngve: In related news, ... Honest, I didn't know Yngve had posted that. I had loaded the page up to Laura's ouch, and when the "Free Preview" stirred strange resonances in my fanboy brane, I forgot to refresh before posting. Perhaps Yngve was also posting under the influence of emeralds. --- Making Light: Confession ::: February 10, 2005, 06:09 PM julia: about the author picture: does it bother anyone else that what appears to be the bottom of her ribcage is peeking out from under her sweater on the side and it doesn't continue to the front of her body? Not too much. If I could tell "bottom of ribcage" from "cropped flab" I might find it unsettling. No, what bothers me is the idea that someone sliced off her hips. Even in Photoshop, that makes me wince. --- Making Light: Open Thread 36 ::: February 17, 2005, 11:11 PM As the cats were giving me the time-for-breakfast m[ae]ssage this morning, someone on the radio talked about the administration's policies that would give the terrorists paws. As if our furniture isn't in bad enough shape already. ObLatella: Pause? That's different. Never mind. --- Making Light: Open Thread 37 ::: March 09, 2005, 09:08 AM Owlmirror: Or cute little fox puppies which have been bred (for 20 generations) for doglike traits. I feel a story treatment coming on. A fox and his dog. --- Making Light: Open Thread 37 ::: March 21, 2005, 03:07 PM Xopher: Eventually, of course, it will simply become a greeting or validiction. "OK, I'll see you Saturday." "OK, Whoa Re." "Whoa Re." I thought it was an imperative along the lines of "Can". Such as, "Whoa re the obsessive search for meaning in that typo!" Or as Butch Cassidy might have typed, "Whoa re those guys!" --- Making Light: Atlanta Nights and PublishAmerica ::: March 21, 2005, 05:38 PM Georgiana: I wouldn't call Bill's piece an article. It's so vague and slanted that I was going to call it an op ed but now I think it's more like a letter to the editor. Its unedited malaprops and clichés suggested one of those essays we see posted by burnt-out teachers trying to get kids to have opinions for the SAT, usually with the student's name blacked out. Or possibly a writing sample for the sequel to Atlanta Nights. Thanks, Lenora, for glossing "East/easy", I couldn't parse that one at all. Rummy: Why are the publisher in question's authors attacked as though they themselves are the publisher? I second Aconite's request for examples. I love to see the *I'm one of the publisher in question's authors and I'm being attacked* line, because there are people around here who can trace sock puppets all the way back to planet V****B****. --- Making Light: Atlanta Nights and PublishAmerica ::: March 21, 2005, 05:53 PM John M. Ford: "Literally" is only useful when one is trying to say that an event that might otherwise be taken as a figure of speech has actually happened word-for-word as described; for example, to describe the aftermath of a violent protest by saying "there was literally blood in the streets." That's what "literally" would be useful for if it weren't misused more often than not. Nowadays, saying "there was literally blood in the streets" doesn't inform the reader whether the blood is literally literal or just figurative blood from a writer of convenient fiction. To make the point, you have to say there was real red arterial blood spurting out of the very protesters' actual arteries and making blood puddles on the concrete asphalt. Even then, someone's going to gush about your gift for metaphor. --- Making Light: Atlanta Nights and PublishAmerica ::: March 21, 2005, 06:19 PM Vicki: I got a postcard from Albacon (the New York one, not the Scottish one) a couple of days ago. They are advertising, as a special guest, Travis Tea. I ran into jan howard finder (modulo my memory assigning the wrong name to a face I haven't seen much lately) in a Lunacon elevator, and he gave me a card for Albacon. I asked him, "All of Travis Tea?" and he admitted it wasn't. I wish I had made it to the room party to pump him on the real shomi shoyu. Last I heard, Travis Tea isn't even all out yet. But I'm talking to the fastest gun in the wiki, I thin. --- Making Light: Open Thread 36 ::: March 21, 2005, 06:29 PM Zzedar: The most disturbing item ever on e-bay, and that's saying something. Cmon, it doesn't take that much googling to find out what a snuff mull is. And how do you figure a ram's head to be more disturbing than whalebone or elephant ivory? Or hamburgers, for that matter. The resale that lost me my faith in humanity was thirty years ago, on the computer lab door. Someone wanted to sell his copy of Knuth's book on logarithms. --- Making Light: Open Thread 37 ::: March 22, 2005, 06:16 PM Xopher: "Eggcorns" are called 'folk etymologies' in linguistics. Just FYI. About the time I decided to try collecting some, I ran into a thread on LINGUIST-LIST that called them 'reinterpretations'. 'Eggcorns' are some subclass of reinterpretation that seems to imply a folk etymology together with some other requirement about 'sounding exactly the same'. And not being in a song, because then it would be a mondegreen, or whatever. Too much work on definitional orthodoxy turns Jack sour on the subject. Hearing that these had an official linguist name didn't dissuade me from the cute term du jour, which was then 'pullet surprises' (as in 'the interminable speeches after the pullet surprise dinner'). I still prefer it to 'eggcorns', at least partially because I don't elide gs like that. At least it doesn't sound like it to me. I'm tempted to dig up my old list and shovel them off to the eggcorn guy, but I don't know if it's worthwhile weeding out the duplicates. After all, someone has already told him about 'doggy dog' for 'dog eat dog', and I don't know if it makes his cut, though it seems to be fairly popular. I'm particularly fond of that one because I saw a second-level reinterpretation: 'dog y dog'. --- Making Light: Open Thread 37 ::: March 22, 2005, 06:23 PM Oops, sorry. The linguistic term I misremembered is "reanalysis". --- Making Light: Atlanta Nights and PublishAmerica ::: March 23, 2005, 05:39 PM On the Travis Tea web site they list Albacon 2005, Albany, NY October 7-9, 2005 Publicists in attendance: Chuck Rothman under "Travis Sightings" on a page titled "Author appearances". Since Chuck Rothman and the other "publicists" are also listed as authors in the wikipedia article, I guess that's what "publicist" is supposed to mean. I don't know what the "Author appearances" that don't list "publicists" are supposed to be. Daniel Pinkwater's publisher once made a life-size cardboard-backed photograph of him that had an unusual adventure, but I don't think they sent it on tour. --- Making Light: Misanthropy at the grimy end of winter ::: March 24, 2005, 08:58 PM I'd say this week's anti-catholicism was triggered by a lawyer explaining to a judge how the lady might have to spend time in purgatory if they stopped her life support. Did I get that right? A lawyer explaining purgatory in a US Court? Then the Pope tagged in and started rolling around with them in the same sty. Pretty soon the only thing you can see is mud and crucifixes. I was once a little catholic boy whose dad explained that people were afraid to vote for JFK, because he might run the country under orders from the Pope. But I figured Kennedy was an American and would support the First Amendment, so I wasn't afraid. Do the Schindlers believe in the First Amendment? Does the Pope? Maybe it doesn't matter if the ones now sworn to preserve and defend the Constitution don't. --- Making Light: Open thread 38 ::: March 25, 2005, 12:31 PM sundre: has anyone got a pick for the opposite of nostalgia? The answers you get illustrate the problem with the "opposites" game: there are many different criteria to be opposite in. Opposition to a longing for features of the past could be, for example * A longing for the future, for the present, or for any time that is not the past * A sense of revulsion for the past, or to ephemera * A lack of emotional response to the past, or more generally to time linkage I suspect I've only scratched the surface. If you really want a word for something, what do you want that word to mean? --- Making Light: Misanthropy at the grimy end of winter ::: March 25, 2005, 07:37 PM James D. Macdonald: Furthermore, you don't just give up being Catholic. Baptism puts a permanent mark on your soul. No matter what you do, or don't do, believe, or don't believe, Baptism remains. Speak for your own soul, mister. Circumcision leaves a permanent mark; my baptism washed off just fine. No matter what you or anyone may care to believe. I realize your remarks were in the context of people presuming to judge whether someone else was lapsed. I don't judge whether she died a Catholic on the basis of her history, and I equally stand against such a judgement made by others. If it is a doctrine of someone's faith that she was or was not Catholic, then that is only relevant to her faith if she believed that doctrine. --- Making Light: Misanthropy at the grimy end of winter ::: March 27, 2005, 08:47 PM Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little: ...What gave me pause was, the rebuttal "[You're] wrong" seemed aimed, not at a statement about Catholic doctrine, but at Dan Hoey's opinion about his own soul. "You're wrong about what Catholics believe" is par for the course; "You're wrong because you disagree with Catholic belief" is, however, not something I'm used to reading here.... I take the denial of what I know about my own soul--coming as it does without reasoned argument, and from someone I have never met--to be a statement of faith. Not necessarily "You're wrong because you disagree with Catholic doctrine" but "You're wrong because what you say denies my deeply-held religious belief". The distinction is important because, doctrine to the contrary, most Catholics do not believe in every doctrinal point taught by the church. Whatever its nature, James D. McDonald is welcome to his faith, and I will not argue with him further on its points, for all my faith in its incorrectness. I think it might be more polite for him to be more explicit about the source of a belief based on his faith, but that may be too much to ask. Many people cannot distinguish between what they know from observation and what they know from faith, and there are cases on the border between these that are hard to categorize. In addition, I am not exactly an expert in politeness, so my analysis of this nicety is suspect. In sum, I don't hold any animus against JDM, and I rather regret the somewhat intemperate nature of my outburst. I felt his statements, as applied to my soul, to be degrading and false, but I'm sure he doesn't mean them to be. And whether or not he does, that's life in a multisectarian society. --- Making Light: Misanthropy at the grimy end of winter ::: March 28, 2005, 06:54 AM Mark D.: You will always be given wine in Anglican/Episcopal churches; rarely, if ever, in Catholic. How recent is your information? I got the impression in the 1990s that wine was de rigueur. Chewing, too. Though perhaps my memory is leaking again. Let us also dismiss the suggestion of someone choking a comatose patient with a communion host. There are procedures for administering communion to people who cannot swallow; after all, there is no theologically minimum size for a host. Procedures might be not be followed every single time, but this case is being carefully watched. --- Making Light: Timed ::: March 28, 2005, 07:23 AM Lucy Huntzinger: I checked our copy of the paper, but it didn't make the National Edition. Boo! I read it online. Yay! A note that I read after paying $4.50 for the opportunity to verify the information personally. Very well, it's a lesson whose tuition does not pinch me, and the diploma does serve for wrapping fish. The crosswords were a fair diversion, too. For those who get only an intro and an invitation to subscribe from Teresa's link, you can find the article with a search engine. Alternatively, you can subscribe for free, or use well-known subscription avoidance techniques, but I found this method preferable. --- Making Light: Misanthropy at the grimy end of winter ::: March 28, 2005, 04:23 PM Xopher (Christopher Hatton): I feel that if you're going to do deiphagia, ... Surely that should be theophagia. Or deivorousness? you might as well acknowledge it...we rip ours to shreds and put butter on him. As long as you don't do hot buttered laps. Honest, I just heard of Goats this morning, and now I'm their biggest fan! --- Making Light: Open thread 38 ::: April 01, 2005, 10:27 PM Xopher: I've heard that the Pope just died. I've heard it twice, and both times I have heard later that his health has deteriorated. I believe we would do better to listen to news reports than to rumors. I don't know of anyone reading Making Light who lacks access to cnn.com, Google news, or the rest of the gaggle who will report within thirty seconds of his last breath, so perhaps reporting the news or rumors here is not particularly useful, either. --- Making Light: Extreme measures ::: April 01, 2005, 10:38 PM Melissa Mead: The poor woman got used like a rope in a tug-of-war. The image I kept getting was of the crowd in Somalia using the airman's body as a puppet. --- Making Light: Minor housekeeping note ::: April 05, 2005, 12:54 PM Teresa, I'm very sorry to hear this is happening. Most of what I know about narcolepsy I read in Making Book, and at that time you seemed to be struggling in the dark for a solution that might not even exist. Since then, you attained years of what appears to be a reasonably controlled life, and then there was that messed up dosage (and all the illnesses, and all the stress, and all the other shit). I can't tell whether you are back to the numb struggle, or clawing yourself up to the acceptable life style, but I hope you can find the energy that you applied to the task in years past. Remember you got on top of it once, and take heart from that victory. I will sing power chants for you. Please make taking care of yourself your priority. Use the slow writing and the groping through darkness to that end, the recovery. That is what you need your energy for. The rest will wait for when you are well. Of course, there are times when you just have to wait for the healing, and if working and writing helps pass the waiting, I'm not telling you to stop. Just that it's easy to let the things you know how to do crowd out the hard, uncertain, and ambiguous work you need to do. I hope some of this helps. Get well soon. --- Making Light: Your homework done for free! ::: April 06, 2005, 04:59 PM Xopher: Thanks Adam, I found it. I still don't see the part about Laura K. Krishna blogging, though. I'm probably just confused. The blogging is being done by Nate Kushner in at least eight threads-- over a thousand comments. A handful of those comments are signed by Laura, but most are obvious fakes. Nate made up fake names for her and her university after the story got spread around, though a little creative googling will show you the originals. He also seems to apologize for making the story public. I'm trying to figure out if he's afraid of getting sued. I'm also not completely sure he didn't invent the whole story, possibly using the name of a real student at a real university. Mostly, I'm trying to figure out where all those people come from who think the story is true and that Nate's the villain and she's the victim. Maybe those are fiction, too. After all, this guy's supposed to be a professional comedian. One of the ways Urban Legends live is by affirming something people want to believe. Perhaps this story will lead to a decrease in phony papers, even if false. I hate it when people justify lies on that basis, though. --- Making Light: Open thread 39 ::: April 22, 2005, 11:02 AM The Very New York particle reminds me of a very recent New Yorker cartoon, perhaps in the current issue. It's a gritty street scene, including a utility pole with a wind-battered "Lost Pigeon" sign on it. --- Making Light: Open thread 39 ::: April 15, 2005, 07:14 PM Lisa Goldstein: Then there's the guy who asked for the book with the red cover, about a submarine. We actually figured that one out -- it was Hunt for the Red October -- which had a gray cover. Well, yes. The wiring between our color words and color perceptions is weirder than it seems. I've seen a T-shirt that has the words green blue red yellow orange printed in bright red, orange, blue, red, and yellow (or some other permutation--I'm not sure it matters). The challenge is to say what colors the words are. Sounds easy, but it makes your mouth go funny. Not terribly relevant to your anecdote, but interesting? --- Making Light: Habemus papam ::: April 25, 2005, 07:37 AM S. Dawson: If you treat a religion as a set of propositions ... even religions making absolutist truth-claims don't really have to be mutually exclusive, because chances are their proposition-sets have some elements in common.... So a religion that claims to be definitely true doesn't claim all others are wholly false, it only claims the others are false insofar as they contradict it.... That argument does not address the issue of mutual exclusivity. Christians, Hindus, and Atheists all believe that knife wounds hurt, but that doesn't make their faiths compatible. If I believe "X and Y", and you believe "X and not Y", then not both beliefs can be true. That's what "mutually exclusive" means, and agreement on the "X" parts doesn't contradict the incompatibility between the whole beliefs. --- Making Light: Open thread 39 ::: April 25, 2005, 07:43 AM Mispoppy.com sells A hefty 7 ounce bar of soap made from Somalian Frankencense, Indonesian Nutmeg and ginger in 100% vegetable soap base. No lamb's blood? --- Making Light: Open thread 40 ::: May 06, 2005, 11:39 AM On the various sizes of infinities, it's true that multiplying any two infinite cardinals gives you the larger of the two; in particular, multiplying an infinite cardinal by itself doesn't change it. The decimal correspondence between a line and a square given by Eleanor is essentially correct, though extra trickery is needed for some positive numbers, too (i.e., those with finite decimal expansions). You can get larger cardinals by putting a cardinal in the exponent: For any cardinal x, 2^x is larger than x. 2^x is defined as the number of subsets of a set of size x. This takes us from the number of integers, w or aleph_0, to the number of real numbers, c=2^w. As Eleanor and Vicki note, the question of whether the second smallest infinite cardinal aleph_1 is equal to c is called the Continuum Hypothesis, and is "unproved". I use scare quotes because the Continuum Hypothesis is essentially unprovable--its truth or falsity cannot be determined by the usual axioms of Set Theory. We can have two set theories ST_+C and ST_-C, where c=aleph_1 in ST_+C and c>aleph_1 in ST_-C, and they don't really say anything different about the finite things we can get our hands on (though the two theories do disagree on some other hypotheses of interest to set theorists). Finally, I'll warn that the term "hypothesis" used for such unprovable matters is also used in the Riemann Hypothesis, which may be provable (if true) and if false would certainly be disprovable. --- Making Light: Open thread 40 ::: May 06, 2005, 01:55 PM Eleanor: I was taking it as read that all real numbers have infinite decimal expansions, although some of them end in infinitely many zeroes. Those that have IDEs ending in zeros also have IDEs ending in nines. Thus the straightforward decimal correspondence assigns both 31/66=.469696... and 37/66=.560606... to the pair (1/2,2/3)=(.5,.6666...)=(.4999...,.6666...), thereby failing to be one-to-one. A little extra trickery gets around the problem. JvP must be really enjoying this! Is that one of those subtextual things? If you're concerned that he might take this as license to turn this into his blog, I think he's a little more circumspect that before. If you're concerned that someone other than JvP may object to excessive mathematical content, I wouldn't mind dropping the topic if someone expresses an objection. Otherwise, I'm just helping to clarify some issues other people have found interesting enough to partially explain. I'm enjoying it. --- Making Light: Open thread 40 ::: May 06, 2005, 02:04 PM Paula: Trying to catch Arctic char in Thule with hotdogs as bait also doesn't work. And I was just about to name Professor Paula as the catcher of Arctic char, in Thule, with a hotdog! I must have been misinformed.... --- Making Light: Open thread 40 ::: May 06, 2005, 09:53 PM Julia Jones: I obviously haven't quite shaken off the Papal extravaganza, because my first interpretation of the following comment by Dan was rather odd: it's true that multiplying any two infinite cardinals gives you the larger of the two Thanks for helping me understand why I felt so weird with the language. So when I saw your post, I looked back to where this thread introduced the term, and there was Cardinal Law--gack! Now I'm imagining something like the law of sines--"when the big guy in a dress multiplies with the little guy in a dress...." Eww, I must apologize; I feel like the frothy senator who starts talking about public policy but can't evade his obsession with interspecies sexuality. To cleanse our mental palates, let me consider Vicki's comment, Aleph-2 is defined as the smallest cardinal greater than aleph-1, and I think that if you find a provable use for it, you've got a publishable doctoral dissertation. Of course, the usual issue with dissertations is not so much whether they are publishable (all are "publishable", but few would interest a publisher that doesn't think the song is about them) but whether you can get a degree with it (and we may want to distinguish here, too, between real universities and the other kind). If you buy your dissertation from Terpmapers.com and submit it to Degree Mill U, can you use it to embarrass Public Shamerica afterwards? --- Making Light: Open thread 40 ::: May 09, 2005, 06:37 PM John Houghton: You can't use the paragraph tag

to start a new paragraph. Sure you can, but you have to end the paragraph with a

like the standard says. Actually, you don't even have to do that--the syntax grues will give you all the

s you need at the end--but if you do it that way you're nesting your paragraphs, rather than putting them one after the other like you probably intended. You may not be able to see the difference, but the all-seeing eye of the HTML standard knows. The
markup was previously prohibited, but is now available. Perhaps

was also disallowed at one point, but not in my memory. --- Making Light: Open thread 40 ::: May 10, 2005, 06:02 PM Dave MB: If each element of the set can be named by a different sequence of bits with a single "..." in it, then the cardinality of the set is at most c. (This is a mapping from natural numbers to bits, or an "omega-sequence" of bits.) So real numbers can be named by their binary expansion, which ends in a "..." [....] This description is dependent on what we mean by "named". The problem is that each of the names you propose refers to many* different real numbers. That isn't too surprising, since there are only aleph-null such names. I doubt that the description in terms of ellipses adds non-illusory clarity to the issue. * Where many=c. --- Making Light: Open thread 40 ::: May 10, 2005, 06:32 PM Faren Miller: JVP: In case you hadn't noticed it yet, the NY Times has a piece about a guy who has produced the first Platonic solids puzzle to include all of them, Russian-doll style. It's "http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/10/science/10puzz.html?8hpib" That gave me an one sentence of the article and an invitation to register with the NY Times. I've managed to decline that invitation quite a few times. In this case, you can get pas it with a referral from Google, which doesn't ask any nosy questions (perhaps because they already know). Andy Perrin: Be careful when explaining HTML to code < as < and > as >. And if you have to explain this point to anyone, be sure to code < as &lt; and > as &gt;. And if you have to explain this bit, well, ... remember that the preview button is your friend, and to keep a copy before you send stuff to the grues. --- Making Light: Open thread 41 ::: May 24, 2005, 06:08 PM Patrick Nielsen Hayden: By the way, it's probably occurred to Charlie Stross already, but lots of people following his wiki link are probably sitting there looking at a seemingly blank page... Patrick, Charlie probably knows what you're talking about, but I just followed Charlie's homepage link http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi link from his Making Light post, and it has a TOughGuide link http://www.antipope.org/charlie/toughguide.html that starts out with the ToughGuideIntro tiddler displayed, with enough navigation clues to get started. Does the wiki link you mention link elsewhere, or are you having trouble with the places I found? Or should I just butt out and let you work it out with Charlie? But this tiddly stuff is a little differently organized. Like how do you get a permalink? I try "copy link location" in Firefox, and I get a URL that would be stuff if I dared to put it in a real link. --- Making Light: Open thread 40 ::: May 12, 2005, 09:42 PM Linkmeister: From The Scientist: random, nonsense computer science papers-complete with figures, graphs, and references. Another nosy link, another opportunity to refuse to register. Does it have anything more than the SCIgen page? --- Making Light: Open thread 41 ::: May 24, 2005, 06:21 PM Jules: ... Is there any particular reason why most of the entries have two initial capitals in their title? Christopher Davis: Jules: multiple capitals in a single "word" is a common way to get a Wiki to recognize a word as a TopicTitle I don't know if I'm revealing my age or flaunting my geezerhood, but I was thinking someone had reinvented StuDlycAps. --- Making Light: Lo heere ::: May 24, 2005, 06:56 PM Patrick, I'm here from the open thread, becasue this is more of a style thing, but you know there was a comment about how three-column format eats up the real estate. Here's how it works. On the Making Light front page, in a roughly 9"x12" Firefox window, I get columns about 3", 7", and 2" wide. The front page goes for about eleven screenfuls. But the left column is only 7 screens tall, and the right column is only 3.5 screens tall. So if the right column matter were transferred to the left, there would be more room for the middle column, or I could use a 10" wide window. People who have narrow monitors get this much worse, because the left and right columns can't shrink much, so the middle column becomes very skinny and long, and at the bottom you've got this skinny middle column with huge margins. Oops, I've got to leave; more about this later. --- Making Light: Making Lighter ::: May 24, 2005, 09:14 PM Hi, Teresa, I don't suppose there could be a lighter way of reading comments? I feel presumptuous asking for features, but what's the point of a stripped-down front page when the comments are where the action is? By the way, I just noticed that the preview pane shows previous comments, but not the originating article. Sure, I can look at it in another tab or window, but I think the article would be useful here. Said the picky, picky, presumptuous, presumptuous person. --- Making Light: Gasoline and fluorescent tubes ::: May 31, 2005, 11:14 AM I suppose I was precocious, because I did my investigation of fuel-air explosions when I was eleven or twelve. It was a natural outgrowth of my previous studies in "how deep a hole can I dig with this post-hole digger?" together with a new-found interest in "is there anything more interesting I can do with gasoline than mowing the lawn?" The part I hadn't figured out is that the first shot warms up the hole, so the second shot has much more vapor to work with. This oversight would have gone unpunished if I hadn't insisted on looking into the hole to see the blast. Myopia may have saved me from blindness (my glasses deflected the hot gasses from my eyes) but maybe not--the blast was not really extreme. The skin burn was barely first degree, lost in the sunburn I already had. I might have gotten away clean if Mom hadn't asked where my eyebrows went. --- Making Light: Open thread 41 ::: June 06, 2005, 11:16 AM According to babelfish, the infernocrusher site says: The excavators can only much limit upward gradients or pleasure straining to drive on. When (exactly) did I stop being able to say "simply makes you feel very strange" without a lewd chuckle? Is it getting unseasonably hot in here? --- Making Light: Open thread 41 ::: June 06, 2005, 05:20 PM Dangerous books? The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. In 1983 I went to look up a word and dropped the dictionary on my toe. I went to the ER to see if the toe was broken, and eventually got the bill charged to Worker's Compensation. That got the bean-counters involved, so my boss got an accident form to fill out, and he assigned that task to me. Simple justice. The last line on that form gave me the most trouble. "Remedial action taken to prevent future accidents of this nature." I finally settled on "Employee was told to be careful with books." I've still got that dictionary, and I'm always careful with it. --- Making Light: Open thread 42 ::: June 09, 2005, 02:22 PM Scorpio: Ah, what the blanks said to me finally surfaced: "The Widget, the Wadget, and Boff." You, me, and half the readership. What astonished me (when I brought the immense power of the Internet to bear on bringing the words to the top of my cranial eight-ball) was the overwhelming tendency to omit the brackets from The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff. Was it republished without the flourishes, or do people simply omit them? I second tnh's appreciation of Tim's entry. John M Ford's is a valiant attempt, but I've never known Bertie to care about the age of his brandy, as long as it was not too diluted with soda. I also suspect that the first comma needs to be an exclamation point. The true, the blushful answer embarrasses those of us who could have counted underscores, who could have noticed a remarkable number, and who didn't. All die. --- Making Light: Open thread 42 ::: June 09, 2005, 03:01 PM Pellegrina, A search for Gordon R Dickson's ultimate library (The Final Encyclopedia) led me to John Gunn's article on Libraries in SF. I can imagine you might rather avoid it for fear of being drawn into a plagiarism trap, but when there is prior art on the subject, your work must compare and contrast itself. Consider yourself compelled there. You have my sympathy for any difficulties this information may cause you. By the way, there was an article or story, somewhere in the narratonoetic region that stretches from popular maths to science fiction, about the dire results of the exponential growth in scientific libraries. I somewhat expect an authoritative ID from someone on Making Light within 90 minutes of this comment, unless my presumption puts them off. --- Making Light: Slush: noted in passing ::: June 09, 2005, 03:45 PM Ingly, brave Ous warrior, cruelly imprisoned in the dungeon of If. --- Making Light: Open thread 42 ::: June 09, 2005, 05:18 PM Pellegrina, "... an article or story, somewhere in the narratonoetic region that stretches from popular maths to science fiction, about the dire results of the exponential growth in scientific libraries." was Kurd Lasswitz's story "The Universal Library", which appeared in Fantasia Mathematica, edited by Clifton Fadiman. This long-out-of- print gem was reissued a few years ago, along with its companion volume, The Mathematical Magpie. --- Making Light: Slush: noted in passing ::: June 10, 2005, 12:36 PM I recognized the use of people-names. As an owner of Billy- the-Bookcase, Niklas-the-Wall-Unit and a former owner of Bjorn-the-Dresser, this was pretty obvious. Fond memories of a college friend who named her chair Chesterfield, her sofa Davenport, her footstool Otto, and her carpet Waldo. She always had to footnote the carpet's location (sebz gur jnyy gb gur qbbe). --- Making Light: Open thread 46 ::: July 29, 2005, 01:47 PM Michelle K: Happy Rain Day everyone! Marvelous! Did anyone else notice this paragraph? John Daly had won hats from such notables as Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Johnny Carson, Cassius Clay and Arnold Palmer just to name a few. He also would bet local TV personalitites from the Pittsburgh Area. In 1967, he bet Del Miller, who owned the Meadows Race Track in Washington, PA. That year, not only did Mr. Miller give John Daly a hat, he gave him a complete set of racing skills. I wonder if the New Yorker is looking for submissions. --- Making Light: New York subway searches ::: July 29, 2005, 08:50 PM The foreboding announcement I heard in a DC metro station went something like "Help prevent incidents like the London bombings from happening here. Report unattended luggage." That was the gist of it. --- Making Light: Note to self ::: August 01, 2005, 02:53 PM At an upscale burger joint in Pittsburgh, when I was in grad school, I had a dish of sherbet. I found a lump in it with an odd taste--not quite pineapple, no, definitely not pineapple, somehow very definitely wrong but somehow familiar. Eventually I recognized it as a dice of onion. It probably fell off someone's burger order. Not particularly bad, but definitely incongruous. I found a different adulteration years later. I was overjoyed to find tapioca on the menu at Denny's--I had forgotten how much I loved it as a kid. And it was truly fine, until I found the lump, which didn't taste odd, but was much too hard to belong in the tapioca. It was a chunk of glass, perhaps from a broken dessert goblet. No, I couldn't accept a replacement dish of tapioca from them--you have to trust your tapioca supplier. Now I cook it myself three or four times a year. It's my potluck staple. --- Making Light: Better bad sentences ::: August 04, 2005, 01:27 PM A testicle comes across the sky, squeaking. --- From Haoyuep@aol.com Mon Aug 15 19:58:43 2005 Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2005 19:58:33 -0400 From: haoyuep@aol.com To: kfl@keithlynch.net Subject: Re: Bitwise palindromes Cc: sethb@panix.com Keith F. Lynch wrote: > But I've spent today working with a new kind of palindrome. I used > the old five bit code that I think is still used by deaf people, radio > hams, and possibly by newsrooms and Telex. (There's a telex.com, so > I guess Telex is still around.) This code is usually called Baudot, > but is more properly termed Murray or IAT2. (Baudot was a completely > different five bit code that hasn't been used in about a century.) Thanks for reminding me of this code. I think I translated tapes of this into ASCII in the mid 1970s for Documentation Abstracts, an information Science publication that was being typeset at Yale (I had a line on typesetting the Yale faculty directory, the cumulative index of American Scientist, and this journal index). Anyway, the raw data had been prepared offline on paper tape, and I'm pretty sure this is the code you're talking about. As I recall, IAT2 (or whatever I used) has codes for SHIFT and UNSHIFT, so you could encode capital letters (and maybe could double the number of special characters that could be encoded, though perhaps SPACE was the same whether shifted or not). If so, are SHIFT and UNSHIFT useful in palindromes? Are they--gasp--each other's reversal? Oh frabjous arena for palindromic hacking. Speaking of which, since you're both interested in recreational math and perhaps palindromes, do know about palintiples? If not, take a google for them, they're neat (and much of them is my own invention). > I'm CCing Seth partly because he might find this interesting, and > partly because he's a IAT2 palindrome, himself: > SETH = 00101 00001 10000 10100 Some people are lucky in their names. I'm fortunate my name uses the restricted alphabet abdehmnopqsuwxyz, permitting the retronym I use for my uname. Though it's not quite as startling as the case of Joe mayhew, who used his good name to great effect. Good to hear from you again. Cheers to all. I can hardly wait to see you at Capclave. Come to think of it, I'll probably need to arrange for someone to make sure Teresa doesn't fall over. And Seth, you presumably don't know what I'm talking about, but you'll find out the next time I see you. Cheers to all from sunny Sacramento (using the web-based AOL interface for the first time), Dan --- Making Light: Political spam ::: August 25, 2005, 08:10 PM Graydon: (I have, for instance, never bought anything from Amazon because they spammed me many a year ago.) I have never done business with Amazon because I've heard of people who got spammed by them many a year ago, and because everything I've read about their policy grants rights only to their customers, and because as far as I have seen they never officially said they aren't planning to start spamming everyone who is not their customer as soon as the frog boil warms up. But my wife thinks I'm crazy, so do you have a copy of that spam you could send me at haoyuep@aol.com, or is there an archive of big south american river pork product? --- Making Light: Political spam ::: August 26, 2005, 01:55 PM Tina: Amazon definitely curbed their spamming, but... My question is and was whether they admitted ever doing it, or even said they wouldn't in the future. Shomi shoyu? --- Making Light: Political spam ::: August 28, 2005, 11:21 PM Tina: I don't think they ever made any kind of public statement amounting to "Whoops, our bad," no. But offering an easy way to change email preferences and sticking to those preferences is at least a tacit acknowledgement they needed such a system. What email preferences? I've never expressed any preferences to Amazon, nor done any business with them, nor given them my e-mail address or name. I've avoided doing so based on reports of them sending spam some time ago. It sounded like Amazon acquired some e-mail addresses in some other way than by the addressees asking for e-mail from Amazon, and then sent spam to those addresses. I have not been able to confirm or refute such reports. As long as they don't acknowledge those reports or repudiate the practice, there's no reason to suppose they won't scrape my address of Making Light and send me spam tomorrow. I've looked at their web site and seen their nice big link to a privacy policy. It says their customers have rights not to get unwanted e-mail from Amazon. They don't seem to acknowledge that I, a non-customer, have any rights at all. I'm not looking for them to deny that they f pigs, I just want them to say they don't send spam. Do you think I should become a customer with spam houses in order to use their easy way to express my preference not to receive spam? How many spam houses should I go through this with? My impression is that any such attempt at expressing my preferences would get me more spam, not less. --- Making Light: Soundtrack ::: August 30, 2005, 08:24 PM Call me Pollyanna, but I keep hearing "Octopus's Garden". --- Making Light: Soundtrack ::: September 02, 2005, 09:10 PM I wrote: "Octopus's Garden" And I can't unwrite it, but believe me I'm missing New Orleans now. --- Making Light: In Our Nation's Capital ::: October 19, 2005, 06:28 PM Marilee wrote: Yes, Jeffrey, that makes sense for this year. But since we know there will be no hot water next year, either (they're not replacing the old boilers before then), we should just get a reduced rate. He was not disagreeing with you, but I do. It makes more sense for the people who are actually inconvenienced by the lack of hot water to get the reduced rate, rather than everyone who rents a room. The inconvenienced ones mention the problem at checkout and get their discount. People who take showers when the hot water is sufficient don't need a discount. It beats me how Ernest Lilley is involved with this, though. --- Wikipedia Talk:Combinatorial game theory History The history section used the term disjoint sum which I corrected to disjunctive sum (ONAG, p. 74). This should be described more completely, since it is the fundamental insight that makes CGT an advance over the diffuse theory that preceded it. I must say that I am quite uncertain about the History section. The mathematics of CGT were presented in ONAG six years earlier than WW, and the latter extended the theory in fairly minor ways. I don't imagine that Conway cares to argue priority; in fact, he acknowledges Berlekamp and Guy as his sources for much of the material in ONAG. But saying that WW "pioneered" CGT and was preceded by ONAG with some of its content seems an odd sort of horsecart. --Dan Hoey 23:34, 23 October 2005 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Combinatorial game theory 2004-2005 I've modified your text a bit to speak of well-founded games, rather than finite non-loopy games. The distinction is a bit fine. For instance, consider the game G for which L(G)=R(G)=N, where N is the set of all nim-heaps. G is not finite, but it is well-founded. Conway calls these games "Enders". --Dan Hoey(because the signature feature seems to be malfunctioning)68.239.81.167 01:57, 24 October 2005 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Combinatorial game theory 2004-2005 I see that what happened is I got logged out. Anyway, I've modified the definition of C_fin so that it covers all the well-founded collections of games. --Dan Hoey 02:18, 24 October 2005 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Combinatorial game theory 2004-2005 I've fixed some problems with the definitions of well-founded games and C_fin. But what really needs to be done is to make this page more consistent with the Surreal numbers page. I've made a start by introducing the G = { L(G) | R(G) } notation. But the part about taking the quotient needs to be continued to talk about which games are numbers. Also something about the quotient being the greatest refinement that preserves outcomes of disjunctive sums. --Dan Hoey 15:22, 24 October 2005 (UTC) --- Wikipedia User talk:Dan Hoey I'm Dan Hoey, a mathematician, programmer, computer science researcher, science fiction fan, and wise guy. Most of my Wikipedia contributions in 2005-06 were to Combinatorial game theory, but I have decided to be a CGT researcher and recuse myself. This is my talk page. You can talk to me here, but if I don't respond, you might e-mail to me at [1]. My work e-mail address isn't hard to find if you look around. Try to say something in the subject that doesn't sound like spam--I know it's hard to beat the Turing test in forty characters, but you can do it if you try. --Dan Hoey 19:48, 24 October 2005 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Nim Last move game I don't know if last move game or last stone game is really used, so I deleted it. Anyone who wants it back should say something more specific than asserting that it is used in some regions. --Dan Hoey 19:28, 26 October 2005 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Nim Cleanup I've rewritten much of the explanatory material to be more explanatory and correct, especially the relation to combinatorial game theory. The mathematical part got minor edits, mostly to make the stuff consistent. --Dan Hoey 19:33, 26 October 2005 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Surreal number/Archive 1 Infinitesimals Star(*) and up are examples of games that are not numbers. Is that what you mean by pseudosurreal numbers? And e is an infinitesimal, so that problem is answered. --Dan Hoey 21:01, 26 October 2005 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Surreal number/Archive 1 Infinitesimals Any surreal is unchanged by adding extra right options larger than some existing right option. Since e+1 > 1 > e+1/2 > 1/2 > e+1/4 > 1/4 > ..., both the above forms of 2e are unchanged by replacing their right option sets with the union of their right option sets. --Dan Hoey 21:01, 26 October 2005 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Mathematical game Disentangled This page seems to have little encyclopedic content apart from its relatives. I think it might be better as a disambiguation page between * Gardner's Scientific American column and its successors * The general subject of recreational mathematics as celebrated and popularized by Gardner * Other recreational pursuits of mathematicians such as juggling, unicycling, change-ringing, music, ... some of which may have mathematical content and some of it just attractive to the mathematical mind, if anyone really knows what that is. But that sounds like mathematical recreations to me, which might find a home on recreational mathematics. * Classical Game theory and extensions, e.g. by Nash * Combinatorial game theory which includes Sprague, Grundy, C. L Bouton, and other predecessors to Berlekamp, Conway and Guy and successors. I'm a newbie, though, and not bold enough to dike out whatever User:Eclecticology was trying to do. --Dan Hoey 04:09, 28 October 2005 (UTC) --- Wikipedia User talk:Dan Hoey What time is it I just want to track "now" against "then". I tried to prefer UTC+5, but I think it is being spotty about taking effect. --Dan Hoey 16:47, 28 October 2005 (UTC) --- Making Light: Home ::: November 09, 2005, 02:20 PM My favorite pornonymous takeoff was Toothless People, about women who get their teeth extracted to improve their fellatio quotient. I never figured out how they did those special effects. The other porn special effects I never figured out featured an actress playing siamese twins. I mercifully forget where she was "joined", but it looked horribly realistic. --- Making Light: Open thread 53 ::: November 09, 2005, 05:18 PM Dan R. wrote: ... difference number 217 (between 1327 and 1361) was a notable outlier. The difference of 34 was the highest of all in the first 1000, and significantly higher than other differences in the first 250. The prime density is smoother than you'd expect from a probabilistic approach, because the prime density has a negative feedback mechanism --too few primes now translates into too few factors (so more primes) later, and vice versa. I recall something I heard thirty-some years ago about how the prime gaps are especially chaotic, too, but the details escape me. Google for "prime gaps" and you get hundreds of matches, many very good. Can local wizards comment on this? You know who you are. The problem is that a lot of (nonlocal) non-wizards "know" they are wizards, too. See Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. I'm not sure whether math is especially magnetic to that kind of personality, or whether I see it more in math only because that's where I'm looking. I saw them break sci.math, and now they're gnawing away at wikipedia. I sometimes envy people who are only alienated by the government. --- Making Light: Open thread 53 ::: November 10, 2005, 11:00 PM Daniel Martin wrote: Okay, I'll go out on a limb and declare that my favorite prime is -5. That's right - negative numbers can be prime too, and -5 is.... Yes, but in that sense -5 is the same prime as 5, as their primality is based on the ideal they generate, which is the same prime ideal of the integers. But 5 is the principal representative, just as it is the principle representative of sqrt(5). It's not quite as ambiguous as whether the principle representative of sqrt(-1) is i or -i. There's no way to tell which sqrt(-1) is which. I think the alternative use of -1 as a prime occurs in some very specialized cases, but I don't remember where. It's a lot narrower than "number theory". --- Making Light: D&S: a story from Capclave ::: November 14, 2005, 04:47 PM xeger writes: "*snicker* Dinosaurs and sodomy..." "Uh, okay - what's with the blood?" Of course there's going to be blood! [*] --- Making Light: Display dumps ::: November 14, 2005, 06:25 PM Tying two arcs of this discussion together, the most egregious use of the bookhenge and repeated spot ads I've seen was by an author on the Atlanta Nights or PublishAmerica panel at Balticon. Even if I remembered her name, which I don't, I probably wouldn't finger her--she had apparently learned the self-promotion reflex during her victimization by PublishAmerica. Not that I really want to see her on a lot of panels, but I doubt she's that much of a convention regular anyway. Unlike the wonderful Capclave panelists and GsoH, whom I hope we didn't wear out. --- Making Light: Open thread 54 ::: November 21, 2005, 06:26 PM Sara Rosenbaum wrote: Tinfoil Hats: the definitive study. Any idea why they used LRH to model the helmets? Are the tinfoil hats' resistance (or lack thereof) to electromagnetic waves supposed to be correlated to resistance to engrams or thetans or some other sort of dianetic brainworm? --- Making Light: Found rant: in re PQN ::: December 12, 2005, 07:24 PM "PQN"? Are we going to deliberately print not enough? I think it was Constellation, the 1983 Worldcon, that made such a splash with the "PTM" model. --- Making Light: Odd cheat, now binned by vicar* ::: December 16, 2005, 04:20 PM James D. Macdonald wrote: See too my review of another book that relied on anagrams here: Light Hearted Friend. The best rebuttal I've seen was in a letter to Harper's after they excerpted Wallace's book. See the Cecil Adams column. ---