Wikipedia User talk:Dan Hoey Hello Well, I was Dan Hoey then, but younger. New Haven or Washington? I forget exactly when I moved, and I'm afraid I don't recognize your photo. --Dan Hoey 01:42, 8 March 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia User talk:Dan Hoey Hello Oh, I get it. It was New Haven, and those were publication dates, and I guess I don't know you, but you know of me. Yep, assistant midwife to CG, that's me. By the way, your user page link to EDA goes somewhere you probably didn't intend. --Dan Hoey 01:58, 9 March 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Lamplighter group Questions about the Lamplighter group I got here by accident, and I'm not really an expert in the lamplighter group, and the wreath product definition didn't really help. So I got the presentation from http://arxiv.org/abs/math.GR/0312331 and worked the rest out on my own (getting it wrong on the first try). But the definition there defines a finitely generated group, and the wreath product definition apparently defines an uncountable group, which cannot even be countably generated. If we are talking about Growth rate (group theory) (which seems to be the motivating feature for this article), that is defined with respect to a particular generating set, and it looks like that set needs to be finite. Perhaps we need to refer to the finitely supported subgroup of \bigoplus_{(-\infty, +\infty)} \mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z}, but I don't know the name for that. \bigcup_{n=0}^\infty \bigoplus_{(-n, +n)} \mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z} is only approximately correct. A second question is a proof that the group is a solvable group. Anyone? Dan Hoey 03:07, 9 March 2007 (UTC) mod Dan Hoey 14:08, 9 March 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Sigma-algebra Existence So what does It is the countable analog of a Boolean algebra, and every s-algebra is a (represented) Boolean algebra. mean? And is a s-field just a variant term, or does it mean something slightly different? Dan Hoey 19:03, 9 March 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Lamplighter group Questions about the Lamplighter group Indeed I was confused: the direct product \bigoplus_{(-\infty, +\infty)} \mathbb{Z}/2\mathbb{Z} is defined to have finite support and so is countable.Dan Hoey 18:18, 11 March 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Sigma-algebra Existence I've answered this to the best of my ability, by changing the opening paragraph. Someone who actually knows about this stuff might vet it. I'm also considering changing the example (which is more suited to Boolean algebra) and moving this segment of the discussion down to the bottom of the discussion page.Dan Hoey 19:23, 11 March 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:John Horton Conway Image Thane Plambeck has provided a good, recent, fully cc-by-2.0 licensed photo. He even cleared it with JHC. Dan Hoey 17:40, 13 March 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Presentation of a group Math rating Just a place to sign edits to the math rating. Dan Hoey 19:36, 11 March 2007 (UTC) Then I noticed it belongs in the comment. Dan Hoey 19:39, 11 March 2007 (UTC) But since this section is here, I changed the comment to reference this section. This also removes the indication that I assigned the grade, which I didn't. -- Dan Hoey 15:45, 14 March 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2007 March 19 Richard_k_guy -> Richard_Guy Carelessly capitalized, ignores WP:NCP, double redirect (main article is Richard_K._Guy) Dan Hoey 16:00, 19 March 2007 (UTC) --- Making Light: A spelling demonology ::: March 20, 2007, 03:00 PM You can add me to the list of people who were going to write in about the typos in "icthyology" and "restaurateur" but checked the previous comments and a dictionary first, respectively. And Jo (123), you was robbed, but I suppose second grade is about the right time to start learning that life is unfair, and that you can get robbed by stupid people. Me, I washed out of the (8th grade) bee early because my brane melted in the middle of "definition". The whole class's eyes were upon me, and three more is broke the camel's back. --- Making Light: A spelling demonology ::: March 20, 2007, 03:19 PM Oops, in my message #130 I meant to refer to Caroline's #122, not #123. While I'm back, I'll note that I was floored by an NPR commentator saying that they intentionally pronounce the month "Feb-u-ary". Harrumph. I certainly wouldn't pronounce restaurateur with an n unless I forgot how it was spelled. Which I believe is the only reason anyone does. I had heard that the given name "St. John" was pronounced sinjin, but I never heard it until a radio presentation of Jane Eyre played Sunday night. --- Making Light: Bub, bar cher flap! ::: March 20, 2007, 03:43 PM If I may extend the discussion to another common self-inverse cipher, I'll note that WIZARD is notable for being a kzormdrome. Pity it isn't in 1337key. --- Making Light: Bub, bar cher flap! ::: March 20, 2007, 04:31 PM Erik Nelson asked: What is a kzormdrome? I figured geeky people would want to figure that out for themselves. But since you ask, I'll warn the others: Don't look at the following if you want the fun of working it out for yourself! Pbafvqre n pvcure gung gnxrf "cnyva" gb "xmbez". Vs lbh ybbx ng gur yrggre cnvef, lbh zvtug svther bhg gur fvzcyrfg bar. Lbh pbhyq draw a diagram vs vg qbrfa'g yrnc bhg ng lbh. Gura nccyl vg gb "jvmneq" naq frr jung lbh trg. --- Making Light: A spelling demonology ::: March 20, 2007, 04:41 PM Diatryma: "My favorite spelling bee word is 'aitch'." In French, the letter "Y" is called a "Greek I". But do they spell it "i grec" or "y grec"? I don't really know. --- Making Light: A spelling demonology ::: March 20, 2007, 04:45 PM lost_erizo (141), Schuylkill is almost pronounced like "skookle", but there's supposed to be a hint of an l before the k. You can do it if you practice. (I'm not a Philadelphian, but I learned this from one). --- Making Light: A spelling demonology ::: March 21, 2007, 08:08 AM Eleanor(202) A restorator runs a restorant, where one goes to restore one's strength, since the food has restorative properties. Or, to follow the etymology a bit more slavishly, `...since food has the property of restoring one's well-being.' As purportedly did the original tonics and potions known as restaurants. (223) I'd pay good money for the collected Nielsen Hayden lightbulbiana. All the wheat and none of the chaff. As opposed to that kneebiter Carson Wyler. (227) ajay, re your father's menhir. Where is that from? Sounds like something Joe Orton would say. Very good, at any rate. Such a manhly weapon, though prone to ithyphallicity (which I would have misspelled with an i had I not looked it up). (165/217) Yes, sapphire. Shades of phenolphthalein! (he said, proud and amazed to have guessed that one right before checking.) --- Making Light: Bub, bar cher flap! ::: March 21, 2007, 08:21 AM Congratulations, Henry. R gsrmp gsv yvhg mznv uli gsv xrksvi rh "lnvtzkh". --- Making Light: Open thread 82 ::: March 21, 2007, 09:35 AM Serge (629) Phil Frank's Farley comic-strip serves us a groaner of a pun [March 16]. Google shows that one on rec.humus in 1991. A blind ungulate could tell you where it originated. I mean "ab-rlrq qrre" . --- Making Light: Open thread 82 ::: March 21, 2007, 10:22 AM Oh, so this is the day that day oerpowers night and Teresa increments her tally. Fortunate coincidence. Happy Birthday! Happy Birthday! Happy Happy! Birthday Birthday! Gaudi Vernum! Equi Noctus! Equi Equi! Diem noctem! And someone will be surely be able to correct my inflections. Please do. Then eunt domusI will be enlightened. --- Making Light: A spelling demonology ::: March 21, 2007, 01:48 PM Don't slink for me, ajay (248). I didn't mean to mess up your joke, and I'm grateful to have been given the chance to correct my own spelling before I embarrassed myself (if it wasn't embarrassing enough just to have the word ithiphallic at the tip of my, uh, cerebrum). --- Making Light: Bush patently in denial over Gonzales ::: March 21, 2007, 02:48 PM Sorry Lori (#68), Civil Service protections don't apply to political appointments, which the 93 U. S. Attorneys are. They are routinely fired and replaced at the beginning of an administration, at least when parties change hands. However, they haven't been fired in the middle of a term before except for gross misconduct. That might lead to a conflict of interest between keeping their job and protecting the Constitution. The other thing that's new is that until the P. A. T. R. I. O. T. Act, they had to be confirmed by Congress. The P. A. T. R. I. O. T. act gave Gonzales the power to appoint new U. S. Attorneys for 120 days, on the theory that tewwists might assassinate a U. S. Attorney at a time when there just wasn't time for Congressional approval. Then there was the recent change that made Attorney General appointments permanent, which some Congresscritters claim they didn't notice before voting on it. Gonzales still has right to appoint U. S. Attorneys "permanently" for about another week, but that train is heading back into the station retroactively. There was an interesting memo I heard about on the radio this morning asking "What good is this power if we don't use it." Apparently not everyone in the administration believes in this tewwist nonsense. --- Making Light: A spelling demonology ::: March 21, 2007, 03:14 PM I've had no trouble with fluorescence and its relatives since I started envisioning the flouron, the fundamental particle of wheat. That's the white dust that gets all over flourescent lights, and it's the reason GM products flouresce in the dark. --- Making Light: Bush patently in denial over Gonzales ::: March 21, 2007, 03:26 PM I think I erred in (#79) on one point. As far as I can tell from Wikipedia, the 120-day appointment power predates this administration, and was not changed by the original P. A. T. R. I. O. T. Act, only the 2006 revision. --- Making Light: Open thread 82 ::: March 21, 2007, 03:36 PM Owlmirror (#752) Also "to buoy up", I believe. Do not underestimate the possible meaning in here(nt in the title). --- Making Light: Bub, bar cher flap! ::: March 21, 2007, 03:42 PM Eleanor (#48) closeish. int => vag; ine => var. --- Making Light: A spelling demonology ::: March 22, 2007, 01:28 PM Chris (308) mentions `"ichthyology", which is consistently mispronounced "ick-theology".' I don't think that word means what you think it means. English (or American English) dictionaries describe the pronunciation used by speakers of the language; if it is consistently used by native speakers, it can hardly be an error. When English picks the pockets of other languages, it often shucks off any inconvenient phonemes in order to make the swag easier to conceal. How would you imagine ichthyology could be correctly pronounced? icks-theology? Maybe the first step is figuring out why "chi" is pronounced "kiy". --- Making Light: Bub, bar cher flap! ::: March 22, 2007, 08:14 AM A guy writing a screenplay once asked me if I could find a palidromic word square in English. The only 5x5 in an online version of the OSPD was SEMES EDILE MINIM ELIDE SEMES I hadn't thought of a "four-way" word square, in which we don't require a palindrome, only that the square be made up of words in all four rotations. There should more of them. --- Making Light: A spelling demonology ::: March 22, 2007, 01:53 PM Jakob #318: from an old word list: psst tsks phpht schmo schwa schlep schmoe schrik tsktsk pschent schlepp schlock schmalz schmeer schmoos schmuck schnaps schnook schtick chthonic phthalic phthalin phthises phthisic phthisis schmaltz schmelze schmoose schmooze schnecke schnecken I manually took out inflected forms "-s", "-ing" "-y", etc. and also "cwm" and "crwth" because they use the vowel "w". I didn't go through to see if there was a case of "y" being used as a consonant. "phthises" is arguably a form of "-s", but irregular enough to leave in. I also left "tsks" in because "tsk" is not there, but I'm not sure why. If he "tsks", why cant I "tsk"? --- Making Light: Bub, bar cher flap! ::: March 22, 2007, 02:10 PM R nvmgrlmvw gsv Lnvtzkh xrksvi zmw lgsvi rnkilevnvmgh gl gsv wvevolkvi lu Ovvgpvy, dsl rh rmgvivhgvw yfg gll yfhy zg gsv nlnvmg. --- Making Light: A spelling demonology ::: March 22, 2007, 03:33 PM Och, I didn't intend to insult any Scots. It's just that I speak a different language. Did I ever tell you about trying to get a train ticket from Glasgow to Holyhead by way of Oxford? The kind agent told me I would do best with a round trip ticket to Oxford, and then to... but he cleared his throat every time he started telling me where to catch the train to Holyhead. He finally had to spell it for me (Perjr). --- Making Light: Bush patently in denial over Gonzales ::: March 22, 2007, 03:48 PM 72, 91, 94, ... I deeply resent the way this administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist. --TNH --- Making Light: A spelling demonology ::: March 23, 2007, 12:05 PM Jakob (341) the sch- words on that list were from Hebrew often through Yiddish, except for Dutch schrik. Even schwa, which surprised me. The phth-, psch-, and chth- words are from Greek. The rest are onomatopeoic. And since those are all the four-consonant words on my list, they include all the words with more consonants: phpht and tsktsk. One variant of the latter is tsktsks, which holds the record. --- Making Light: Bub, bar cher flap! ::: March 23, 2007, 12:24 PM Thanks for the javascript, which is now on my toolbar, too. But I still think the name "Omegaps" beats "revcode" all hollow. Perhaps because it's my own invention. --- Making Light: A spelling demonology ::: March 23, 2007, 07:01 PM Diatryma (275) -- I, too, grok a wrongness in phenolphthalein, and indeed the -ein was the hardest part for me to guess. I blame its baleful influence for my having written "arvyfraunlqra" earlier today (I can't admit it in plaintext). Still, without -ein we wouldn't have "grok". --- Making Light: Open thread 82 ::: March 23, 2007, 09:04 PM Nice link, Xopher (820) though it relies on people having an outdated image of Steve Jobs. They got the uniform right. --- Making Light: Open thread 82 ::: March 25, 2007, 04:51 PM About the Hillary's "F*ck You '07" Tour. Particle, the National League of Cities web site is back (if they ever vanished) with their distinctive logo. Now if anyone can find a political organization with a logo that resembles G**ts*, maybe we can get one of former Sen Rick "Spreading" Santorum's colleagues to visit. --- Making Light: Bub, bar cher flap! ::: March 25, 2007, 05:29 PM Sorry, Owlmirror, Omegaps is what I call it, and I stand by #63. I freely offer you my permission to call it any way you want, if my permission is of any help to you. Remember Alexander Pope: "'Tis with our judgments as our watches, none/Go just alike, yet each believes his own." I didn't invent the cipher, just the name I use for it, and I'm sure other names have been and will be used. I'm not even the person who discovered the property of "wizard" (and I don't recall where I heard it), though I did invent the name "kzormdrome" for what it is. If granted, my wish for user-generated ciphers added to leetkey (with user-supplied names) will let a thousand flowers bloom. Still, I don't understand "Zaxbycwd". Do you mean "Zaybxcwd"? --- Making Light: Fuzzy internet porn law struck down ::: March 25, 2007, 05:36 PM On #69-#72, am I the only one here who has heard of the movie Flesh Gordon? I don't remember much about it, and I doubt I saw it, but it seems related. --- Making Light: Open thread 82 ::: March 26, 2007, 08:05 PM Serge @ 883--English gets to alter the pronunciation of its loan words. But 'fam' is quite an odd pronunciation, since the French say something much more like 'fum'. But feem, fime, foam, or fum, only context will tell you whether they mean "idiomatically French woman" or "feminine-acting lesbian" or probably some other meaning that doesn't come to mind just now. Speaking of which, David Sedaris had an excellent essay in the February 19/26 New Yorker on how the question "Which one of you is the woman?" is a symptom of how so many straight people are ...trying to determine what goes where, and how often. They can't imagine any system outside their own, and seem obsessed with the idea of roles, both in bed and out of it. Who calls whom a bitch? Who cries harder when the cat dies? Which one spends more time in the bathroom?" As always, he has fun making fun of the question. He claims to have responded "'Oh, we live in New York,' as if that answered the question." --- Making Light: Bub, bar cher flap! ::: March 26, 2007, 09:02 PM Owlmirror, "Atbash" has all the subtextual resonance I was looking for, and more. I firmly support Atbash. Omegaps was a mere fancy of my fevered brain, and has trademark problems to boot. Thank you for finding Atbash. --- Making Light: Open thread 82 ::: March 26, 2007, 09:20 PM On the "How do you lose a steel mill?" particle, I'd think the answer was obvious. With so much use of steel, they probably had to run the steel factories faster and faster, whereby they were found naughty in the eyes of the lord and struck down. --- Making Light: Bub, bar cher flap! ::: March 26, 2007, 09:43 PM Rob (68) It's from Joe Haldeman's 1981 short story "A !Tangled Web". --- Making Light: Hugo and John W. Campbell Award finalists, 2007 ::: March 29, 2007, 01:19 PM Well, Ulrika, according to a gafiated small-name-fan, when I read scalzi.com, it reads fannish. Maybe not corflu-twill fannish, but there's definitely sensawunda in there. And he's passed the first test, which is getting nominated by fans. We'll have to see how the second test goes, won't we? --- Making Light: Author Identity Publishing ::: April 01, 2007, 12:55 PM Dei, 44: Under those circumstances, it'll be a very rare person who'll accept first prize. I think you underestimate the ability of quite a number of people to convince themselves of what they want to believe, especially if they are incapable of earning what they think they deserve. Don't forget Unskilled and Unaware of It. No foolin'. I'm really unsure how this relates to Texanne's(45) comment about the Bush/Gonzales affair (he said with a slash). --- Making Light: Open thread 83 ::: April 03, 2007, 10:04 AM Fragano Ledgister (186): I seek the wisdom of the fluorosphere... I never saw that story, and I really, really want to read it. It sounds like it might have been in one of those anthologies edited by Yvec N. Fybbs that I've been looking for ever since I found out about fandom. If so, I congratulate you on having seen it, and please let us know the outcome of your search, or if you remember any other interesting details of the work. --- Making Light: Open thread 83 ::: April 03, 2007, 10:19 AM Fragano (225), I'm not offended, and I apologize if my request for confirmation was offensive. I'm even happier that it was a genuine request (my hints to the contrary notwithstanding) because I really do want to read it. So please do tell me if you find where the Bradbury Ray and North Pohl were. The only work that I remember even approaching that level of Pro Fan à clef is Niven's The Flying Sorcerers, with its narrator "As a shade of purple-gray". --- Making Light: Bub, bar cher flap! ::: April 03, 2007, 10:36 AM Amy (71) Having been oversuspicious before in my remark on the anthologies of Yvec N. Fybbs, I'll just ask--can you could supply a hint about where Cyegm Tyeo arises? --- Making Light: Open thread 63 ::: April 03, 2007, 12:45 PM Dem spammer puppycat/dogkittens are zombies. I wonder if they can find me some purebred thin dogs. With braaaaains. --- Making Light: Author Identity Publishing ::: April 04, 2007, 09:38 AM James (#119) Check out the bizarre quotemarks in "Young Goodman Brown." That's what happens when you want to create ``directed'' quotes out of plain ASCII. I first saw this used in the TeX language. Of course, it's better when you run it through a text processor, or even print it in a font that has slanted apostrophes. I think some fonts even have curly apostrophes and render grave accents as inverted curly apostrophes. But when you're into cut-and-paste-and-don't-worry, that stuff goes out the window. But given the ASCII quotes, I expect the PD text was ripped off the web somewhere. I think the Gutenberg project has restrictions on commercial use--I wonder if someone might not have bothered to check on that, being a big-time lawyer and all. It would be interesting if he got to pay for that, on top of the "out-of-the-cell" revisionism in the PW article. ``Why in a million years would I want to ruin the name of a character I am trying to brand?'' The usual answer is ``because you wore the juice, so you thought you would get away with it.'' --- Making Light: Author Identity Publishing ::: April 06, 2007, 11:59 AM Tina@109 and Trip@130, I sympathize with you and your kitties. It's a wonderful and terrible thing that we fall in love with beings who don't live as long as we do. In regard to Trip's note, One of my cats has chronic renal failure, so I'm going to be facing the same thing in (vet's estimate) a few weeks. I hope your vet knows about feline CRF maintenance care, and has good reasons for rejecting it. When the cat's kidneys are functioning at a inadequate level, it is possible to maintain quality of life with regular subcutaneous fluid infusion, which is a form of osmotic dialysis. The injections, which I expected to be a horror for both of us, turned out to be a bonding experience, a regular pet&purr time. I maintained one cat for 18 months and another for 6 months on this regimen. Eventually they died--eventually they all die--but they were healthy and happy during their treatment. So this is a warning for us all--watch your cat for evidence of rear leg weakness, excess water consumption, and bad breath, and see the vet. These may be symptoms of the time in the life of your cat that when taken in the flood lead on to an extended and enjoyable CRF maintenance experience. --- Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Participants * 12:15, 6 April 2007 Dan Hoey (T C) Combinatorial game theory, Computer science applications, Computational mathematics, Recreational mathematics Working in CGT, wide mathematical interests. --- Wikipedia Talk:Noises Off Footnotes I don't know how to reference one footnote from another. If someone who does know happens by before I get around to seeking expert advice, please fix the occurrences of [1] to refer to and the occurrences of [2] to refer to --Dan Hoey 18:39, 6 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine/Archive 3 Review request: Meralgia paresthetica Having been diagnosed with Meralgia paresthetica, I read the wikipedia article and informative articles on emedicine.com, aaos.org, mayoclinic.com, neurosurgery.ucla.edu. The wikipedia article was notable for failing to mention the site of the nerve constriction that usually causes this condition. I added the information that I had gleaned from the other sites, and edited some wikicommons pictures from Gray's anatomy to illustrate the text. I invite professional review to make sure the article conforms to WP:MED standards. I also noticed an article on chiroweb.com suggesting that chiropractic treatment is often effective for this condition. I do not know how chiropractic medicine is treated in this venue, and I have no authoritative references for such treatment, so I have not added any mention of such treatment in the article. I bring this up in hopes that an informed professional has something useful and encyclopedic to add. -Dan Hoey 22:46, 8 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:List of medical abbreviations Early threads I believe an acronym arising as an abbreviation is still an abbreviation. At any rate, the word "posh" did not arise as an abbreviation or acronym for "Port Outward Starboard Home". You might do better with SCUBA, which really does stand for "Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus." -Dan Hoey 23:20, 8 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine/Archive 3 Review request: Meralgia paresthetica Thanks to User:Davidruben and User:Arcadian for the cleanup. By the way, the note on exercise came from http://neurosurgery.ucla.edu/Diagnoses/PeripheralNerve//PeripheralNerveDis_3.html; I don't know how reliable that's considered. -Dan Hoey 00:22, 9 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine/Archive 3 Review request: Meralgia paresthetica And thanks again for the good work. It doesn't look like a stub any more, so maybe Talk:Meralgia_paraesthetica is due for a rating change, though I don't know enough to give it a grade. The only really annoying part (and this is probably true of a lot of infoboxes) is that printing the article, which wisely expands the external links, makes the infobox picture so wide that the first page is half empty. We would need someone with deep knowledge of template design to work on that. -Dan Hoey 15:53, 9 April 2007 (UTC) --- Making Light: Open thread 83 ::: April 10, 2007, 12:38 PM ethan (337) My Grindhouse plans for today fell through, goddammit. Hopefully tomorrow. Please be sure to change your trousers first. --- Making Light: Bub, bar cher flap! ::: April 10, 2007, 01:10 PM Thanks for the explanation, Amy. I saw Plrtz Glrb, but I didn't recognize it because I don't speak Whedish. You might also like Koiga Toiy, the Atbash encoding, though it may be a little too vowely for your taste in words. There's also "okqsy hkqa" (the exchange cipher), "eximy nxid" (shuffle), and "hfijl qfia" (unshuffle). Eximy Nxid, my white whale, Eateth squid and waveth tail. Ships do founder every week In the chunder he doth wreak. --- Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine/Archive 3 References to PubMed Yes, I am proposing that there is a solution that simultaneously solves the display of citations and the numbering system. It would not create "", but rather something like "(pmidv 15199035)" to avoid colliding with other systems. I admit that WP has bigger problems to address than references; but eventually the clunkiness of creating references will limit our pool of authors, or limit the pool of authors who take the time to cite their references and willing to edit paragraphs where there is more markup text than displayed text. This problem will grow as paragraphs become better referenced. This process can be automated and should not have to rely on asking other authors to create our tags. [edited above paragraph to change to <ref...> to avoid Cite error. -Dan Hoey 16:39, 13 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia User talk:Oerjan Divergent_series Thanks for the fix on the stability condition. I'm going to try to make sure the situation is more overt by casting the conditions in both forms. -Dan Hoey 20:11, 15 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia User talk:Oerjan Divergent_series I'm a little less sure about changing the definition of stability. The two aren't equivalent without linearity. Are you sure the usual definition of stability assumes that A({c+s[n]}) = c+A({s[n]})? -Dan Hoey 22:14, 15 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Divergent series Stability vs. translativity Sorry for stepping in the same tarpit; I should have checked this talk when I first noticed the reversion. The question of whether stability should be defined on {s[n+1]} or {s[n+1]-a[0]} is moot if we assume translatability (which is a weak form of linearity). But I don't know which is the essential stability, nor whether anyone really makes use of stability in the absence of translatability. But I did notice that the article 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + · · · refers to totally regular summation method, which redirects here. Any idea what that property is? -Dan Hoey 22:57, 15 April 2007 (UTC) --- Making Light: Seatbelts Save Lives ::: April 16, 2007, 01:31 PM Tangentially, I just got diagnosed with a condition that can result from seatbelt injury: Meralgia paresthetica. Some people get it really bad, but in the worst case you can resect the nerve and have a numb thigh; the nerve is purely sensory. Mine was probably from tight clothing and walking too hard, and it's mostly numbness with occasional pain, not bad enough to do anything more than watch out for behaviors that cause flareups. I might have waited until my next physical except that leg pain is possibly indicative of phlebitis. It's mostly an enjoyable but time-wasting experience--a semi-lame conversation topic and an opportunity to play doctor on Wikipedia. Well, enough waste for now. --- Wikipedia Talk:1 - 2 + 3 - 4 + · · · Format of 1/4 What about ^1/[4] which might end up being customizable? -Dan Hoey 12:15, 17 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:1 - 2 + 3 - 4 + · · · Format of 1/4 After looking at Template:frac, I see that (1) They recommend using subst: at this time, because it's still in test, and (b) it expands to your second option except that it wraps the numerator and denominator in , so they are less readable. I now agree that ^1/[4] is preferable, and I'll take up the limitations of Template:frac on the talk page. -Dan Hoey 13:01, 17 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Template talk:Frac frac problems Frac wraps its numerator and denominator in . As subscripts and superscripts, they are already in a smaller font; the result of two smalls is nearly unreadable for me. So I prefer 2^3/[4] to 2^3/[4] But wikipedia is for the consumer; some readers may want to see 2\frac{3}{4}. or even the special case 2¾ So I think that (1) frac should be customizable, and so (2) using it with subst: defeats the purpose. I don't know a technical answer to the problem. -Dan Hoey 13:14, 17 April 2007 (UTC) --- Making Light: Seatbelts Save Lives ::: April 17, 2007, 03:17 PM I wore a bicycle helmet because it's a reg on the military base. Then one clear sunny day, on a manicured road with no traffic, I woke up to an EMT asking me if I knew what day it was, and I was trying to remember the word for Thursday. I don't know if I would have ever remembered the word if I hadn't been wearing the helmet. Good thing they took me to a hospital. The concussion went away quickly, but I had gouged my spleen. Spleens aren't terribly important in adults, but when they break, all your blood goes interstitial and there's none left to pump upstairs. I don't really know what happened--there's a thirty-second gap on the tape. But they found my paper bag twenty feet behind the accident, so I suspect I dropped it, grabbed for it, and lost control. The spleen injury was probably from the handlebars, and the knockout (and hand sprain) from the low dive into asphalt. The moral is to keep paying attention, and to wear the helmet in case you don't. --- Wikipedia Talk:1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + ... s = 1 + 2s, s = infinity The problem is that infinity is a fixed point of every map z -> c + rz, for finite c and nonzero r, so this gives infinity as an alternate solution of every geometric series. It seems a little less remarkable that way. I wish someone could tell us what Hardy actually said about this. - Dan Hoey 23:35, 17 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Template talk:Frac frac problems I don't know where it comes from, perhaps the default, but 2^2[2^2[2]] has decreasing font sizes in the superscripts and subscripts wherever I've seen them (mostly on mozilla-based browsers on Mac OSX and PC). I also find math code, ugly in rimmomg text, especially with the vertical layout (and I don't know how to get a diagonal layout). But the point is that platforms and users differ, and this would (in an ideal world) be the decision of the user. If a user customization option were available to and used by Template:frac, that would be the way to go, but that is not possible if subst: is used. -Dan Hoey 12:27, 19 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:1 - 2 + 3 - 4 + · · · Format of 1/4 I don't know if anyone's really looking seriously; I've put a couple of suggestions at Template_talk:frac that don't seem to be addressed. Meanwhile, I've converted most of the fractions here to ^m/[n] form. One of the ^1/[2]'s got changed back by User:Tompw, perhaps not noticing that there were five other occurrences this fraction (and many more of 1/4 and other fractions) in the sup/sub format. I reverted that, because I'd like to keep the format consistent as much as possible. I'd be glad to change them all to ½ and ¼ if there's some sort of consensus about it, but when I started the situation was pretty chaotic. -Dan Hoey 13:01, 19 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia User talk:Tompw/archive3 Reverting ½ to ^1/[2] Hello, Tompw. I reverted your edit that changed one of the occurrences of ^1/[2] to ½ on the 1 - 2 + 3 - 4 + · · · page. I had been through that page (and several others on summation methods for divergent series) changing all the various ½s and ¼s to ^1/[n] form, basically because User:Melchoir and I seem to find them more readable, and no one else has commented on the subject. The discussion started on Talk:1 - 2 + 3 - 4 + · · ·#Format of 1/4 and I took it to Template_talk:frac as a possibly more central location for the issue. I don't know if this is discussed in more detail somewhere else. I'm willing to follow a consensus, but I'd prefer it if we could be consistent as much as possible. Is there a better venue for discussing this? -Dan Hoey 13:20, 19 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:1 - 2 + 3 - 4 + · · · Format of 1/4 I'm surprised that the 2 did not display correctly. Does this occur in the text as well? What browser and platform? I can see that the version might do, as long as we are in a display equation. At first, it seemed like a big tool for a small job, but the job has tended to expand a bit. I'd better look at the WP:MATH guidelines more closely. -Dan Hoey 12:30, 20 April 2007 (UTC) --- Making Light: Moderation certificate ::: April 20, 2007, 01:17 PM It's a pity shpxgneq isn't public-display-friendly. Have you considered kneebiter? I heard that was Douglas Adams's substitute when they wouldn't let him use nffubyr, but that may be only a legend. I tried to find a good acronym to hide it behind, but the best I've got is duckfart, which is a weak substitute that fails to solve the display problem. On the general topic, I've never figured out whether the prevalence of the term "free speach" is just because morons tend to be multifaceted, or whether it's some sort of shibboleth for the "you can't stop listening to me, I'm yelling" crowd. Why they would want to identify each other, I can't imagine. --- Wikipedia Talk:Palindrome Hebrew palindrome - transliteration The running-text version appears to be mangled (not a palindrome), and no longer agrees with the word square in the diagram. This is only partially due to the problem with line breaks in right-to-left text included in left-to-right text, and may be due to context-dependent letter forms. Perhaps the square would best be done as a wikitable and the running-text version omitted if cannot be fixed to be independent of browser width. I tried to make a wikitable, but I can't figure out how to deal with right-to-left characters. -Dan Hoey 18:36, 22 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Palindrome Get rid of Polish Section I strongly believe the Polish, German, Latin, Hebrew, and Finnish palindromes are relevant to an educated English speaker. We should also include mention of Georges Perec's poem in French, though it appears as a pair of semordnilaps. -Dan Hoey 18:41, 22 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Aperiodic tiling Help rewrite The third and fourth facts, which are proved in Gruenbaum and Shephard and asserted in the Martin Gardner columns, contradicts several statements about periodicity in the article. But I haven't time to edit it now. I hope these concepts will help whoever does work with the article, and that they look up the extent to which these apply to Amman and other aperiodic tilings. -Dan Hoey 01:27, 24 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Penrose tiling No Matching Rules Discussed That rule is erroneous. The actual matching rule can be made by placing an arrow on each side of each rhomb, using two colors as in the diagram. The directions of the arrows can be assigned by choosing a direction for one edge in the diagram and propagating it. The rule is that when two rhombs are placed together, the arrows and colors must match. This seems to boil down to the above rule plus the color constraint when placing two identical rhombs together, but the actual rule also constrains putting different rhombs together. -Dan Hoey 02:28, 24 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Penrose tiling Multiple tilings and rotational symmetry There are certainly finitely many connected tilings given any finite number N of tiles, but there are uncountably many tilings of the plane, using the deflation argument. However, it is important to note that only two of the tilings possess five-fold rotational symmetry. This renders most of the statements about five-fold symmetry false. It should be mentioned that these two, and uncountably many others, also possess mirror symmetry; only the two rotationally-symmetric ones possess mirror symmetry through more than one line. The distinction between finite and infinite tilings is crucial here, since a finite subtiling cannot be used to determine which infinite tiling you are in, nor even where you are in that infinite tiling. Statements about a "rule" that no two rhombs can form a parallelogram are also incorrect, as noted above. The true rule can be seen in the diagram; color the edges of the rhombs as in that diagram, and only allow matching-colored edges to be adjacent. There doesn't seem to be a rating for an article that has quite a bit of good stuff and some glaring falsehoods. -Dan Hoey 02:28, 24 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Penrose tiling This article contains serious inaccuracies, notably in (1) the matching rule and (2) the statements about symmetry. -Dan Hoey 02:33, 24 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Penrose tiling/Comments This article contains serious inaccuracies, notably in (1) the matching rule and (2) the statements about symmetry. -Dan Hoey 02:33, 24 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Aperiodic tiling Help rewrite I fully understand the difference between nonperiodic and aperiodic. I failed to make it clear that it the first clause of that sentence that is redundant. A non-redundant form of that statement would be "In geometry, an aperiodic tiling is a tiling by a finite set of prototiles that do not admit any periodic tiling.". It is redundant to say that the tiling is nonperiodic, because that is immediate from the statement that its prototiles can only tile nonperiodically. Incidentally, I consider the rewording "... that does not repeat itself..." to be an unhelpful dumbing-down of "nonperiodic". -Dan Hoey 12:26, 24 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Aperiodic tiling Help rewrite By the way, I retract my comment that the the phrase "... that does not repeat itself..." is merely "unhelpful". The phrase is simply wrong. After all, every Penrose tiling repeats all finite patches of itself, it just doesn't do so periodically. I don't know of better words than "periodic"/"nonperiodic"; if the reader has to scroll down to the Terminology section to find out what the intro means, that's a good thing, because without understanding what periodic means there's no way of understating what aperiodic means. By the way, the terminology section (or an appropriate section of periodic function) should define the usage "fully periodic" for a periodicity whose translation vectors spans the space. I'm pretty sure that this article should specify "In this article, the term periodic refers to a tiling that is either quasiperiodic or fully periodic." -Dan Hoey 18:24, 30 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Conventions Probability I strongly disagree with CMummert's comment about internal consistency being sufficient. An article links to another so that a reader can get background information on concepts used in the first article. If a page with one notational convention links to a page with a different convention, the process of obtaining background is at least inconvenient and sloppy-looking; in worse cases, it can lead to incomprehensibility or misinformation. So consistency across articles is a very important consideration, at least within the same general subject matter. There is a problem, though, in that tags are widely seen as inappropriate for inclusion within paragraphs of text. So as much as possible, there should be a pair of standards, depending on the rendering environment. I suppose mathml will be a third environment to consider, but I haven't used it. -Dan Hoey 18:48, 30 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Aperiodic tiling Terminology I fixed substitution tiling because its conflation of "aperiodic" with "nonperiodic" is not common in tiling literature. Periodic function still uses the terms synonymously; I don't have a good enough handle on the literature to know whether this is legitimate. -Dan Hoey 18:49, 30 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Penrose tiling No Matching Rules Discussed Periodic tiling showing that the parallelogram rule is insufficient Here is an example of the parallelogram-free hexagon tiling. -Dan Hoey 23:04, 30 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Penrose tiling No Matching Rules Discussed bump-and-color-coding for rhombs I see that Commons:User:Hagman has put up an image of a real set of matching rules. I prefer these rules to the arrow rules by User_talk:Ael 2. Actually, it would look even better without the bumps. Getting the colored arcs into a larger picture for the beginning of the article would require more work, unless we can find something in one of the other wikipedia articles--both the French and German versions seem to have better content than this one. -Dan Hoey 23:42, 30 April 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Morphism Request for arrow decorations I don't know much category theory, but having been given a few diagrams to chase, I've found out that monomorphisms are written as arrows with a hook (\252), epimorphisms are written with double-headed arrows (\240), and isomorphisms are written with double arrows (=>). Furthermore, the algebraists who use these things consider them so standard that the usage isn't glossed in a typical article. It would be really nice if this usage (and any other ways that convey the same information) were described on the morphism page, and were used in Category theory and Commutative diagram articles. I'm thinking of scattering some pointers to this request around, unless there is a better way of accomplishing it. I also don't know how this is best accomplished in text (as above), where the use of various browsers that don't support Unicode must be taken into account. I didn't see anything in WP:MSM or Wikipedia:Mathematical_symbols that suggests ways of accomplishing this. Still, I'm mostly concerned with the commutative diagrams, where I've had one of those "working mathematician disappointed by wikipedia" moments. Perhaps if I were less averse to m*thw*rld I would have found it easier. -Dan Hoey 13:51, 22 May 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Commutative diagram Request for arrow decorations I asked over in Talk:Morphism but perhaps here is a better place. Apparently it's fairly standard in commutative diagrams to use arrows with a hook ( \hookrightarrow or \252 or ↪) to denote monomorphisms, double-headed arrows ( \twoheadrightarrow or \240 or ↠) to denote epimorphisms, and double arrows ( \Rightarrow or => or ⇒) to denote isomorphisms. So standard, in fact, that algebra papers don't even footnote the usage. It would be nice to mention this usage and use it in the illustrations, for those of us who turn to Wikipedia when the paper doesn't make sense. -Dan Hoey 19:57, 24 May 2007 (UTC) --- Making Light: If it weren't so blatant, I'd think it was plagiarism ::: June 04, 2007, 11:01 AM bryan@121--If I make a T-shirt with "I was plagiarised by Mark Mitchell and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" on it, I'll be sure to sign it. And maybe copyright it, too. To paraphrase my famous saying, "All your word are belong to me." --- Making Light: Abi Sutherland, on Catz ::: June 04, 2007, 01:31 PM Hai plz w4k335mi^ 3r|i, w4k335mi^ 3r|i m0m8483 XXOXX c0z 2m0r0 60nn48 4w5um157 d4 0v4||0v 6|4d n00 y33r 0v4||0v 6|4d n00 y33r, m0m8483, 8 4w5um157 d4 R1||y 60nn4 R00L c0z mi c4n h4z pwnxz0r |\/|4Y m0m8483, mi c4n h4z pwnxz0r |\/|4Y kthxbai --- Making Light: Abi Sutherland, on Catz ::: June 04, 2007, 03:12 PM MI GIVZ0RS LIFE & MI PWNZX0RS LIFE SEDZ TEH |0RX|)0R; PEEPZ BLEEV MI & DED PEEPZ RLY GETS MOR LIVZ & PEEPZ LIV & BLEEV MI CAN NO DI NEVER RLY BLEEVIT. MI RLY HAS LIVE BIG OMG GUY K & MRBIG STICK AROUND THRU CREDITS & ALL & IF MI GETS SPLODE MI GETS SEE OMG MRBIG & MI RLY GETS MI SEE 4MI & MI EYZ GETS RLY SEE & IS BIG OMG GUY NOT FAKE SCAM IS REEEL K. COZ NO PEEPZ LIVZX0R SOLO & NO PEEPZ DIIZX0R SOLO. COZ PEEPZ LIVZX0R HAS LIVZX0R FOR TEH |0RX|)0R & PEEPZ DIIZX0R HAS DIIZX0R FOR TEH |0RX|)0R. PEEPZ LIVZ OR DIIZ BUT TEH |0RX|)0R PWNZX0RS K. YAY DED PEEPZ HAS DIIZX0R IN TEH |ORX|)OR & B00Z SEZ MI2, COZ TIIIIRD GTG NAP KTHXBAI. --- Making Light: Abi Sutherland, on Catz ::: June 04, 2007, 11:00 PM tnh, It's Ibaarthg, sebz Png'f Penqyr: Svfu tbggn fjvz, Oveq tbggn syl, Zna tbggn fvg naq jbaqre jul jul jul. Svfu tbggn erfg, Oveq tbggn ynaq, Zna tbggn gryy uvzfrys ur haqrefgnaq. I figured as long as I was doing religion, I might as well do my religion, too. --- Making Light: Abi Sutherland, on Catz ::: June 05, 2007, 12:30 AM HAI W4rn1n6: 6075 use 1337 when r33d1n. U 5332 pr0n 4c7 12 ur pr0b k? While terr1n off 4round 4go|f Mi my8 m4k 4play f0r teh caddi But then mi DO NO WANT fo||o thru Coz all mi {> r belong 2 Dadi. kthxbai. --- Making Light: Abi Sutherland, on Catz ::: June 05, 2007, 09:18 AM (384/431) Hai mi sori. Is 065kur & gotz no kittehs. Hir UR v1.1 ÃY. Still 065kur but gotz hotz kittehs kthx. The (^^)aaai #1 Catz0r Goz H33t Hai gotz2 brekkiez erli, brekkies erli, f33dz0r, meow, Cuz m0rr0s iz gonnaB purrsum157 da uv kittehs ROFCMTO yir. Uv kittehs ROFCMTO yir, f33dz0r, teh purrsum157 mousebirdfish da, Cuz catz0r goz h33t for teh (^^)aaai, f33dz0r, Catz0r goz h33t for teh (^^)aaai! kthkxbai. --- Wikipedia Talk:Penrose tiling use of the word "uncountable" Sorry, Alfe, you're mistaken. You said you branch a finite number of times, but that only tiles a finite part of the plane. If you want to tile the entire plane, then you have to branch infinitely many times, and that makes the number of tilings uncountable. If we take them modulo rotations and translations (placing a vertex at the origin and including a horizontal edge) that's still uncountable. So there are uncountably many different tilings of the plane, but you only can tell if you look at the whole plane. If you look at a finite patch, all the tilings agree (and each agrees in a set translation that is not only infinite, but has positive density.) Only two of the tilings (up to symmetry) have a fivefold center of symmetry. -Dan Hoey 14:59, 5 June 2007 (UTC) --- Making Light: Abi Sutherland, on Catz ::: June 05, 2007, 03:26 PM Munxt lix & napz & sleekist sloth, widz feercist hiss & sharpist clauz, Mi nawz on toyz & scratchiz rugz, & leapz fer birdeez (gifts fer hosts). --- Making Light: Abi Sutherland, on Catz ::: June 06, 2007, 03:57 PM ajay (464) thanks, that was pretty. when mi openz mi ize, sun gets in wiz teh shines; den mi cloz em & naps, still mi keeps it for mines. soes is whyes, in teh nit, when mi runz in teh hall, noes u cant seez no lit cep two wee shines iz all. --- Making Light: Open thread 85 ::: June 08, 2007, 06:39 PM 237-246: So what kind of laptop is it? Anyone know? --- Making Light: Abi Sutherland, on Catz ::: June 08, 2007, 07:11 PM (384/431/444) I suppose it's time to say, is Tennyson's The May Queen. 391, well, I'm kind of ashamed of the way I hacked it up; I'll try to rewrite it with kittehs.... 459 may be anon., though part of it got into SF lit & film. I'm surprised no one seems to have twigged to its texture. --- Wikipedia Talk:Penrose tiling Multiple tilings and rotational symmetry Also, the statement that the frequencies of the two rhombs are equal is incorrect: there are more thick rhombs than thin ones, in the golden ratio. -Dan Hoey 14:43, 12 June 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Penrose tiling Multiple tilings and rotational symmetry Indeed, there are 54 ways: My list omitted 1111222, 111232, 112132, 12232, and 1243. Of course, to write "54" would be OR. Perhaps the OEIS has a sequence for "necklaces from {1,2,3,4} summing to n". Or I could send them that sequence, if find the time to compute it (and its relatives) properly. Or is there a combinatorial objects server that would cough up the answer in a citable way? -Dan Hoey 15:38, 12 June 2007 (UTC) --- Making Light: Open thread 85 ::: June 15, 2007, 09:07 PM Hello, friends and cat fans, I'm not sure exactly what the prognosis is for Wade, our senior cat. He has been anorexic and lethargic for months, losing about five pounds, and we've been trying to get a clue about what the problem is. On the second visit to the internist they proposed a gall bladder biopsy and installation of a feeding tube, which required a hospital stay. For some reason a spheroidal mass about the size of an orange (6-9 cm diameter) appeared on Wade's thigh while he was in the hospital. It probably migrated from his abdomen, though it hadn't shown up on the previous sonograms. So they biopsied the mass, too--the lab results aren't in, so all we know is that it's full of necrosis. If it's malignant we may have to decide whether to go for chemotherapy or palliation or euthanasia. They also installed a feeding tube so we can insert calories via four 75-minute feedings a day (less what Wade will eat for himself). How well he will tolerate this, and how well we will tolerate this, are also unknown. Any revitalizing vibes you care to send to Wade, Anne, and me will be gratefully accepted. Perhaps even cheerfully, though cheer seems a little thin on the ground right now. Dan --- Making Light: Open thread 85 ::: June 16, 2007, 07:11 AM Thanks all for your sympathy. I'm feeling better about this--we've tube-fed Wade twice now, and he seems to accept it fairly well. He spent a fair amount of the time purring. Even the thigh tumor looks less menacing. It's possible he will survive this after all. Dan --- Wikipedia Talk:Substitution tiling Request for improved diagrams The diagrams of substitution tilings should highlight the presence of the initial prototile in the interior of the expanded tiling. Without this, the substitution tiling might not tile the entire plane. For instance, if the second substitution tiling mapped the prototile to its placement in the lower left of the expanded tiling, then the system would only tile the first quadrant of the plane. -Dan Hoey 13:39, 16 June 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia File talk:Penrose kile 3.svg This image should be renamed. The correct term is Kite. I suspect Kile appeared as a typo or mistranslation. -Dan Hoey 00:10, 18 June 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia User talk:Tovrstra Penrose tilings The images are great, but the correct name is Kite. I suspect Kile appeared as a typo or mistranslation. -Dan Hoey 00:14, 18 June 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Penrose tiling Multiple tilings and rotational symmetry I am still concerned that there is no citable reference for either of these numbers, nor for the number of vertices of these types that appear in a Penrose tiling. -Dan Hoey 14:37, 21 June 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Penrose tiling Multiple tilings and rotational symmetry I figured out that what was meant was that the frequency of each orientation of a rhomb is equal, so I clarified that. This whole discussion should be moved to a section that treats both rhombus tiles and kite and dart tiles together, since much of its content is applicable to both. -Dan Hoey 14:58, 21 June 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Conventions Subset notation On the contrary, I think that the subset article should introduce the notation that is actually preferred in other articles, so that the [[subset]] tag in an article points to a gloss of the notation that readers will see. Explanations of variant and historical uses, and why modern authors tend to avoid them, are good material for a section of the subset article, but not the lead. This applies to more than subset--WP links that point to articles that lead with different conventions are a real problem, and this page is the best hope for addressing the problem. -Dan Hoey 15:44, 21 June 2007 (UTC) --- Making Light: Open thread 86 ::: June 24, 2007, 11:02 PM I euthanized my cat, Wade, tonight. He had been hospitalized and he definitely wasn't having any fun. The tumor turned out to be a fibrosarcoma, which is very painful and fast-growing, and the vet told us the only possibility keeping him alive was to amputate his leg. I doubt even that would have saved him. My only regret is that we didn't come to this decision sooner. --- Making Light: Open thread 86 ::: June 26, 2007, 05:16 PM Thanks, Stefan, Diatrima, Tania, Paula, Bruce, Patrick, Soon Lee, abi, Lee, dcb, Mary, Fragano, kouredios, Trip, Lexica, Marilee, Carol, and anyone I overlooked, and anyone who sympathized silently. I'm trying not to blame myself. Next time I'll make sure of the consequences if I have to kill a cat who is hospitalized and they ask me if I'd like to see him. From the delay and his condition, I strongly suspect they cleaned him up for me, adding just that much more pain to his final moments. I'm sure they meant well, but it didn't give either of us any comfort. That's just a cautionary tale for anyone who might be in such a position. "If I can come to see him when you do it, I'd appreciate that. If you can't permit that--if you have to get him out of his cage and bring him to me--then don't, just kill him as kindly as you can." --- Making Light: Open thread 86 ::: June 27, 2007, 10:13 AM Mez@718 -- Please don't go. It's not your fault, happens to everyone. Usually in threes. Just recognize that this is a small battle in the war between humans and computers. And if the computer can embarrass you into leaving, the computer will have won. --- Making Light: Open thread 86 ::: June 29, 2007, 01:30 PM 996-998: A SMOP would have Movable Type (or whatever) just omit the number referring to a comment that is deleted or not yet approved. There can be a placeholder if you want, but the lack of a placeholder would be just fine by me. Maybe group the placeholders: "[comments #910-#915 are intentionally missing]" or something. That way we would save space if a firehose spammer dropped 58 turds that got flushed immediately, but possibly one real comment got posted in the middle of the bunch. The only downside I see is that someone who wants to shout "Fire" in comment 911 may find themselves being foolish in comment 916 because there were skipped numbers in between. But that could happen anyway if there were competition for 911, so tough. Maybe it's an upside if it keeps people from playing inane comment numerology. Well, there's another downside, which is that the top number doesn't tell you how many comments there are. Maybe on the front page mention both how many comments, and the maximum comment number. The comment labels (which are numbers, but could be otherwise encoded) are really, really useful for cross-referencing, so they shouldn't go changing based on approvals or deletions. --- Making Light: Open Thread 88 ::: July 20, 2007, 08:23 PM CosmicDog (389) noted: President Bush has ordered the CIA to comply with the Geneva Conventions' Article 3 ban on torture. Yabbut he won't say what he means by that. He can't give any instance of a practice that this changes. In particular, he won't say if waterboarding is in or out. Is this really a good thing, or just bumf? It's not hard to read his lips--if they move, he's lying. --- Making Light: Open Thread 88 ::: July 27, 2007, 11:53 AM Xopher (#578, 585, 599): In case sleeping on it didn't get you anywhere, here's the problem: The set of all sets of which the empty set is not a subset IS, in fact, the empty set (by 2), but since it's a subset of itself (by 1), it contains the empty set as a subset, which means that it isn't what it was defined to be at the beginning of this sentence. Let S be the set of all sets of which the empty set is not a subset. That is, for all T, T is an element of S exactly when the empty set is not a subset of T. You've noticed that the empty set is a subset of S. This is not a contradiction. The definition of S requires that the empty set not be a subset of any element of S, and that is true (because there aren't any elements of S). The definition of S does not require that the empty set not be a subset of S itself. So everything is right except the last clause asserting a contradiction that does not exist. It's easy to make the mistake of mistaking properties of a set with properties of its elements. I think Plato did the same thing when he defined things called forms that captured the essence of some kind of object. The form of all dogs would be a trait that contained all aspects of dogginess. But if I recall correctly, he decided that the form of all dogs would itself be some kind of dog. This runs into all kinds of paradoxes. For instance, we could consider what kind of objects are ordinary specific objects, as opposed to forms. Then there would have to be a form of all ordinary specific objects. But if forms are instances of the thing they describe then that form would have to be an ordinary specific non-form, which is inconsistent with it being a form. A final caution--defining "the set of all sets with property P" is not guaranteed to work, even though it does in this case. The way it's done rigorously is to define the class of all sets with property P, then prove (if you can) that the class is actually a set. In this case, most mathematicians wouldn't bother, because it's clear that S is a set. --- From Haoyuep@aol.com Mon Aug 13 19:37:58 2007 Date: Mon, 13 Aug 2007 19:37:15 -0400 From: Dan Hoey To: Keith Lynch Subject: Chessboard coloring puzzle Apparently, the rule is that every white square must have an odd number of white neighbors, while every black square must have an even number of black neighbors, where neighbors are counted in the 8-square Moore neighborhood (except where it extends off the board). It looks like you chose the orientation based on lexicographic order starting with the left end of the top row. I believe there are square boards of every size. If a board of side N has the top K rows and left K columns equal to the bottom K rows and right K columns for N-1 > K > 1, then it can be extended to all larger boards of size K mod (N-K). Your 5x5 solution extends to sizes 2 (mod 3), your first 10x10 solution extends to sizes 4 (mod 6), and your 13x13 solution extends to sizes 1 (mod 6). A slight modification of the argument extends your 12x12 solution to sizes 0 (mod 12). I have found a solutions to 15x15, 18x18, and 21x21 that cover the remaining residues (mod 12). I have not found any asymmetric solutions, but I would be surprised if they don't exist. Here are the solutions I have found so far. I don't know if there are more solutions to size 23, but my program listed all smaller solutions (modulo bugs). === size 1 with 8 symmetries # === size 2 with 8 symmetries . . . . === size 3 with 2 symmetries # # . . # . . # # === size 4 with 4 symmetries # # # # . # # . . # # . # # # # === size 4 with 4 symmetries # # . # # . . . . . . # # . # # === size 5 with 8 symmetries . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . === size 6 with 2 symmetries # . . . # . . . # # # . . # . . # # . # . # . . # # # . . . . . # . . . === size 6 with 2 symmetries # # # . # # # . # . # . # # . # . # . . # # . # # # . . . # # . # # # . === size 7 with 8 symmetries # . . # . . # . . # . # . . . # . . . # . # . . # . . # . # . . . # . . . # . # . . # . . # . . # === size 8 with 8 symmetries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . === size 9 with 4 symmetries . # . . . # . . . . # # # . . . # # . . . # . . . # . # . . # # # # # . . . . # # # . . . . # # # # # . . # . # . . . # . . . # # . . . # # # . . . . # . . . # . === size 9 with 4 symmetries # # # . # # # . # . # # # . . . # # # . # # # . # # # # . . . . . # # . # . # . # . # . # . # # . . . . . # # # # . # # # . # # # . . . # # # . # . # # # . # # # === size 10 with 2 symmetries . # # . . . . # # . . # . . # # . . # . # # . # . . # . # # . . . . # # . . . . . . # . . . . # . . # # . # . . # . # # . # # . . . . # # . . # . . # # . . # . # # . # . . # . # # . . . . # # . . . . === size 10 with 4 symmetries # # # # # # # # # # . # # . # # . # # . . # # . # # . # # . # # # # # # # # # # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # # # # # # # # # # . # # . # # . # # . . # # . # # . # # . # # # # # # # # # # === size 10 with 4 symmetries # # . # . # # # . # . # . # # . . . # # # . # . # . # # . . # . # # # . # . # # # . . . . . # # # . . # # # . . . . . # # # . # . # # # . # . . # # . # . # . # # # . . . # # . # . # . # # # . # . # # === size 10 with 2 symmetries # # . . . . # # . . # . . # # . . # . . . . . # . . # # . . . # # # . # . # # # . # . . . . # . . # . . . # . . # # . . # . # . # # # . # . # # # # . # . . # . . . . # . . # # . . . . . # # . . . . # === size 10 with 2 symmetries # # # . # . # # # . # . # . # # . . . # # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . . . . # # # # . . . . . # # # . # # . . . # # . # # . . . . # # . . . # . # . # # . . . # # . # # # . . . . . . # . # # # . # . # === size 11 with 8 symmetries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . === size 12 with 2 symmetries # # # # # # # # # # # # # . # # . # # . # # . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . # # . # # . # # . # # # # # # # # # # # # # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . === size 13 with 8 symmetries # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # === size 14 with 8 symmetries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . === size 15 with 2 symmetries # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # . . . . . # # . # . # # . . . # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . . . # # . # . # # . . . . . . # # . # . # # . . . . . # # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # # . . . . . # # . # . # # . . . . . . # # . # . # # . . . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # . . . # # . # . # # . . . . . # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # === size 16 with 4 symmetries # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # === size 16 with 4 symmetries # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # # . . . . . # # # . # # # . . . . . . # # # . # # # . . . . . # # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # . . # # . # . # . # # . . . # # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . # . # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # # # # . # # # . . . . . # # # . . # # # . . . . . # # # . # # # # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # . # . # # . . . # # . # . # . # # # . . . # # . # . # . # # . . # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # # . . . . . # # # . # # # . . . . . . # # # . # # # . . . . . # # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # === size 17 with 8 symmetries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . === size 18 with 2 symmetries # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . # . . # # # # # . . # . # . . # # . # . # . . # # # # # . . # . # . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . . . # # # # # . . # . # . . # # # # . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . # # # # # . . # . # . . # # # # # . . # . # . . # # # # # . . # . # . . . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . # . . # # # # # . . # . # . . # # . # . # . . # # # # # . . # . # . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . === size 18 with 2 symmetries # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # # . # . # # . . . . . # # . # . # . . # # . # . # # . . . . . # # . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # # # . # . # # . . . . . # # . # . # # . . . . . # # . # . # # . . . . . # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # . . . . # # . # . # # . . . . . # # # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # # . # . # # . . . . . # # . # . # . . # # . # . # # . . . . . # # . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . === size 19 with 8 symmetries # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . . # . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # === size 20 with 8 symmetries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . === size 21 with 4 symmetries . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . # . . # # # # # . . # . # . . # # # # # . . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . . # # # # # . . # . # . . # # # # # . . # . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . # . . # # # # # . . # . # . . # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # . . # . # . . # # # # # . . # . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . # . . # # # # # . . # . # . . # # # # # . . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . . # # # # # . . # . # . . # # # # # . . # . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . . . # . === size 21 with 4 symmetries # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # # . . . . . # # . # . # # . . . . . # # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # # . . . . . # # . # . # # . . . . . # # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . . # # . # . # # . . . . . # # . # . # # # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # # # . # . # # . . . . . # # . # . # # . . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # # . . . . . # # . # . # # . . . . . # # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # . # # . . . . . # # . # . # # . . . . . # # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . . . # # # . # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # . # # # === size 22 with 2 symmetries . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # # . . # . # # . # . . # . # # # # # # . # . . # . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . . . # . . . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # # . # . . # . # # # # # # . # . . # . # # . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # # . . # . # # . # . . # . # # # # # # . # . . # . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . . . # . . . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # # . # . . # . # # # # # # . # . . # . # # . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # # . . # . # # . # . . # . # # # # # # . # . . # . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . . . # . . . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # # . # . . # . # # # # # # . # . . # . # # . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # # . . # . # # . # . . # . # # # # # # . # . . # . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . === size 22 with 4 symmetries # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # . # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # === size 22 with 4 symmetries # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . # . # . # # . . . # # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . # . # . # # . . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . . . . . # # # . # # # . . . . . # # # . . # # # . . . . . # # # . # # # . . . . . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . . # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . # . # . # # # . . . # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # # # . # # # . . . . . # # # . # # # . . . . . . # # # . # # # . . . . . # # # . # # # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . # . # . # # . . . # # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . # . # . # # . . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . . . . . # # # . # # # . . . . . # # # . . # # # . . . . . # # # . # # # . . . . . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . . # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . # . # . # # # . . . # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # === size 22 with 2 symmetries # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # # . . # . . . . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # # . . . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . . . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # . . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # # . . # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # # . # . . # . # # # # # # . # . . # . . . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # # . . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # . . # . # # # # # # . # . . # . # # # # # # . . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # # . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # # . . # . . . . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # # . . . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . . . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # . . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # # . . # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # # . # . . # . # # # # # # . # . . # . . . . # . . # # . . # . . . . # . . # # . . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # === size 22 with 2 symmetries # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . # . # . # # . . . # # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # # # . . . . . # # # . # # # . . . . . # # # . # # . . . # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . # . # . # # . . . # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . # # # . . . . . # # # . # # # . . . . . . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . . . . . # # # . # # # . . . . . # # # . . . . # # # . # # # . . . . . # # # . # # # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . # . # . # # . . . # # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # # # . . . . . # # # . # # # . . . . . # # # . # # . . . # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . . # # . . . # . # . # # . . . # # . # . # . # # . . . # # . # # # . . . . . # # # . # # # . . . . . . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # # # . # . # === size 23 with 8 symmetries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . # . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . --- From Haoyuep@aol.com Tue Aug 14 00:04:07 2007 Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2007 00:03:22 -0400 From: Dan Hoey To: "Keith F. Lynch" Subject: Re: Chessboard coloring puzzle Keith F. Lynch wrote: > Well done. Do I understand that you've generated *all* solutions > through size 22? Yes, unless I've got a bug. In fact I've now run through all the size 24s, and have seen nothing but the known patterns for sizes 23, 24, and 25. > If so, how? My program stalled out around size 15. I backtrack across the board in row-major order, cutting off whenever I create an illegal neighborhood. I don't check for symmetry until I get to the end. Mine is definitely slowing down, but it should still take 4^(n-o(n)) steps to search size n, which is why I'm growing suspicious of my code. > Why would you be surprised if asymmetric solutions don't exist? So > far I've seen no evidence for any. I suspect that there is enough branching in the generation of these objects that sooner or later we will see a place that can be filled in two different ways. My expectation is that asymmetry arises in combinatorial objects when they get large, unless there is some reason it can't arise. But my current examination of the problem leaves me somewhat doubtful; perhaps there *is* something keeping these things symmetric. I'd still be somewhat surprised. Dan --- Wikipedia talk:Requests for mediation/Danah Boyd Discussion The suggestion that only one person is in favor of changing this article's title ignores the people familiar with danah boyd's work, those who only know about her in passing, and those who hear about this disagreement on the Internet. The common opinion I have seen is that Wikipedians are so arrogant that they think they know how to write her name better than she does. Suggestions that this is an exception to some manual of style are belied by articles on k. d. lang, emma hooks, and cat yronwode. The idea that newspapers are more authoritative than her web page, her diploma, and her publications is similarly silly. Newspapers make mistakes, and spelling her name with capitals is a mistake. The reason that there is only one person entering mediation for the contrary opinion is that few people are willing to spend their time arguing with people who are being willfully ignorant. This is a signal failure of the Wikipedia process, and anyone who has any disagreement with Wikipedia is being given a free example of our idiocy to wave in our faces. I am embarrassed to be a Wikipedia editor. -Dan Hoey 22:02, 15 August 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia talk:Requests for mediation/Danah Boyd Comment by Steve If you aren't telling danah what her name is, where are the articles on K. D. Lang, Bell Hooks, and Cat Yronwode? It is indeed hard to be civil with Wikipedia editors who think their opinion on the best way to capitalize her name can possibly override her opinion on the matter. Their efforts do not make Wikipedia a more useful source of information, they merely demonstrate that Wikipedia is run by politicians who are more concerned with warping other people's information than making their own creative contributions. -Dan Hoey 22:17, 15 August 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia talk:Requests for mediation/Danah Boyd Issue #2 I don't understand why this hasn't already been done. While I am of the strong opinion that WP is being incorrect in taking so long to change the article's title, there can hardly be an objection to noting the preference that is being overridden. To omit it makes it look like WP is trying to make it harder for people to find out how silly we are. -Dan Hoey 22:29, 15 August 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia talk:Requests for mediation/Danah Boyd Comment by Steve I don't know what you think I know nothing about. If the k.d. lang, bell hooks, and catherine yronwode articles are following the style guides, then so would a danah boyd article. Mentioning pink characters or funny characters is so irrelevant that I have a hard time assuming good faith. We are talking about a particular stylistic variant that WP has adopted in other cases. The only argument is that that there is some lack of evidence that this is another instance of the same kind of variation. I have a hard time taking that argument seriously. -Dan Hoey 23:01, 15 August 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia talk:Requests for mediation/Danah Boyd Comment by Steve 1. It's not obvious to me that the question is not political. Why are you singling out danah boyd for refusal to render her name in the correct case? Why is this not a no-brainer? Do you really think that some newspaper article is more authoritative than her university diploma and bylines on publications, confirmed by danah's statement on her web page? 2. How you brought up pink ink is irrelevant. You also stated that style guides exist, which is irrelevant, since the style I am talking about is exemplified in WP as I cited. You also stated that no one is telling danah how to write her name, which is irrelevant--I am talking about how Wikipedia writes her name. And you brought up all these trademarks and pink ink, which is precisely what I am not talking about. You even said that everyone has to draw the line somewhere, after I told you where WP drew the line for k.d. lang and bell hooks and cat yronwode. All this is mud in the water, and I'm really having a hard time trusting it's not on purpose. 3. And, yes, I visited the pages, though that question sounds like more mud. But I did visit the pages, and I know they are titled with names of people in lower case. But why do you ask? What I asked, when Carl said "Danah" is the same name as "danah", is Where are the articles entitled "K. D. Lang" and "Bell Hooks" and "Catherine Yronwode"? The answer is that calling it "the same name" is belied by the tenacity with which you cling to the mythical style guide except for anyone with enough fame that everyone would know WP is wrong. These distinctions have significance for the people who are named that way and to the people who want to know about them. So what is it about Wikipedia editors that they get to decide who can have a lower-case name and who can't? What hoops would danah boyd have to jump through to convince you that her name is spelled in the same case as cat and emma and bell? And why should she have to, when the information is right there on the web already? Perhaps my take on the politics of this is to ask why WP is trying to convince everyone on the Internet that WP can't figure out how to write "danah boyd"? That's a political question, and WP is showing everyone just how incompetent it is at getting the facts straight. -Dan Hoey 03:30, 16 August 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia talk:Requests for mediation/Danah Boyd Comment by Steve It's time you started getting more careful about quoting me, or at least quoting me in quotes instead of linking to something that isn't what you say it is. Perhaps you misunderstood my statement of the common belief that Wikipedians are so arrogant that they think they know how to write her name better than she does as referring to telling her how to write her name, but that is not what I said and not what I meant. I'm talking about the arrogance of giving misinformation of how to write her name to people who go to Wikipedia to learn something. And the issue I am addressing is the title of the article (though it would also be foolish to miscapitalize her name in the body of the article) and I'm grateful that I have your permission to fix it. Perhaps we may begin to approach consensus. -Dan Hoey 05:50, 16 August 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia User talk:Riana/Archive 30 Joining Wikipedia:Requests for mediation/Danah Boyd I'd be glad to become a party to the mediation; I've been considering asking you if it was possible. Do I just add myself to the mediation page and add an opening statement to the talk page? And I realize I come across pretty strong; I'll try to cool it down. -Dan Hoey 18:16, 16 August 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia User talk:Riana/Archive 30 Joining Wikipedia:Requests for mediation/Danah Boyd I'll take our previous conversation as expressed permission, and join. -Dan Hoey 13:46, 17 August 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia talk:Requests for mediation/Danah Boyd Preliminary statements from parties Statement from Dan Hoey I am joining this mediation late, by permission of the moderator. My concern is that Wikipedia not appear to be partial to some persons over others in the use of lower-case names. There are three contexts in which this impartiality must be manifest: 1. Determination of whether the person actually has a lower-case name, 2. Title of biography, 3. Mention of unusual orthography in biography, and 4. Use of name in article text, both in biography and in other articles. I know of four examples of persons with lower-case whose biographies appear in Wikipedia: danah boyd, bell hooks, k.d. lang, and catherine yronwode. I do not know have the searching skills to find other examples, but I would like to know about them. Of particular interest would be persons whose biographies were subject to renamings over the lower-case issue, since the resolution of those renamings may be instructive in refining our precedents (whichever way the conflict was resolved). Of course, no amount of mechanical searching will find persons whose names are in lower case but who have not had that fact mentioned in their biographies. In the case of danah boyd, I see the current state of the three contexts in the following ways. 1. The determination of whether danah boyd's name is lower case is in dispute, given the appearance of her name with standard capitalization in print media. I believe this is overridden by reports of her name appearing in lower case in her publications and on her college diploma, and confirmed by statements on her web site. In addition, I am uncertain of the extent to which upper-case appearances of her name in print media arise from those media's stylistic conventions, as in item 4, below. Another issue in the identification of living persons with lower-case names is the length of time that their name has appeared in lower case, since we must distinguish between persons who have started using lower-case recently, since the change may be transient. Ms. boyd's web page claims that she has written her name in lower case since her college years, some time in the 1990s. My belief in the lower-case nature of Ms. boyd's name makes the remaining issues relevant. 2. Her biography is titled in upper case, while the others are in lower case. This seems to be manifestly partial and misleading. 3. The mention of her orthography was added to her biography recently, though I believe it should include some mention of the period of time that she has used lower-case; the current mention, undifferentiated from prior, transient changes of name, tends to discredit Wikipedia users' acceptance of item 1. 4. Use of lower case in the text seems to be resolved by using standard capitalization for everyone. I can accept the rationale, since the use of upper case to signal proper names makes text more readable (consider what we would do with a person named "with are"). However, I am concerned that this convention discredits acceptance of item 1, and I also believe it is discourteous to living persons with such names. Therefore, I will refer to danah boyd in lower-case in this discussion. I will not inflict my orthographic judgment of this matter on article text without a consensus change. Finally, let me express my gratitude for being allowed to enter this discussion. -Dan Hoey 17:41, 17 August 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia User talk:Riana/Archive 30 Joining Wikipedia:Requests for mediation/Danah Boyd Thanks for the permission explicitly expressed on my talk page. I have made the preliminary edits on the page, along with an opening statement. You may want to reiterate the mediator's acceptance and add to your followup to the opening statements. -Dan Hoey 17:46, 17 August 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Template talk:High traffic Request for advice on adding explanation for readers To be useful, there should be a link to this info in the template box, perhaps labeled "why this matters". I'd go ahead and add a stub of this explanation, but I'm not experienced in template editing, and I also don't know where the explanatory note goes--perhaps Template:High-traffic/Explanation? Also, if there's a mechanism to make links on the explanation page point back to the original archived version, the current version, and the diff, that would be useful. -Dan Hoey 15:49, 5 September 2007 (UTC) --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 06, 2007, 11:40 AM Merilee (#195), I'd like to thank you for your candor in describing your father's violence. No one else has mentioned it in this thread, and perhaps it is old news on Making Light; I haven't been keeping up continuously. But I am deeply moved, both in horror and sympathy. I honor you for your bravery in not banishing those memories from your attention. --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 06, 2007, 12:03 PM j h woodyatt (325) and Paul A. (352) on the Wikipedia Irony article marked with a tag indicating self-contradiction. Editor Eleland, who added the tag on August 2, claimed that the article actually did contradict itself, e.g. on whether someone being killed by a falling safety sign was ironic. I personally believe* that the tag was added as an ironical jest. That was the rationale given for deleting the tag on August 28 (one day after jhw mentioned it here). --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 06, 2007, 12:51 PM On the Miss Teen South Carolina particle, Aimee Teegarden asked the contestant, "Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can't locate the United States on a world map. Why do you think this is?" I suspect that part of the reason is that a fifteenth of Americans are under five years of age, and a thirtieth of Americans are visually impaired. I don't know the percentage who are hearing impaired, or non-English speakers, if the "recent polls" were conducted in spoken English. There may also be respondents who didn't pay attention to the question, or who found the poll intrusive in their lives and made it go away in the simplest way possible. Does anyone know what recent polls these are? Greg London (370, before the current unending pointlessness) referred to how the video communicates Ms. Upton's pain in answering the question. While I have no doubt that was painful (see her NBC "Today" show appearance), I was impressed with the poise, smoothness, and apparent conviction with which she delivered her statement. I was shocked at how well she didn't show her pain on the video. On NPR's "Wait, Wait..." show, they joked that she is shortlisted for Attorney General. Of course, the real losers here are the pageant winner and first and second runners-up. Nobody know their names, while the fourth-place finisher is all over the news. --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 06, 2007, 01:08 PM P J Evans (551) noted endless Windows reboots on a ticket machine. I saw a slightly more disconcerting phenomenon--a plane schedule window that popped up a "Symantec Antivirus is disabled" balloon for a second. This balloon pops up momentarily at irregular intervals, possibly when the antivirus definitions are being updated. The condition usually corrects itself immediately, so I have gotten into the habit of just going on working, and checking the status bar later. So I kept on looking for the flight number, found it, then suddenly croggled when I realized what I'd seen. --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 06, 2007, 01:30 PM Mary Dell (583) said, "I know a few men who seem to have body dysmorphia, but instead of looking in the mirror and seeing a fatter person, they see a taller person." First, I think the word you want is "anamorphia". "Dysmorphia" is a faulty shape (and "body dysmorphia" refers to preoccupation with perceived body faults) but, hey, I'm just playing erudite. At 182cm, I've never known whether to call myself six feet (exaggeration), five eleven (incorrect rounding), five eleven and a half (do I sound preoccupied?), or five eleven and five eighths (quick, where's the DSM?). I also don't usually think of myself as tall, because I know tall guys: they're the guys who are taller than me. On the other hand, I usually think of guys shorter than me as average height, down to about four feet, though sometimes I notice guys with short guy syndrome, a particularly offensive form of internalized body dysmorphia. --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 06, 2007, 02:07 PM Diatryma (617) mentions a college student who researched campus accessibility after being wheelchair-bound for some months. This reminds me of the 1992 Worldcon (Magicon), whose chair-riding committee member Bill Wilson was instrumental in alerting the hotel to some missing curb cuts between the Peabody and the Convention Center, in a way that got them fixed. --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 06, 2007, 03:45 PM Okay, that's the backlog. Just a few extras and echoes. In #683 I mentioned my bike accident. I didn't notice the date until after I posted it. That accident was six years ago today. In #686, ethan claims that "e" is the vowel to end all vowels.. I don't think all vowels ends with what he thinks it does. If we get classical, though, "litteratur\303\246 semivocal\303\246" ends with "\303\246", which looks especially nice upside-down. Speaking of which, "ethan" spelled upside-down is "ueyta", which not only ends with a vowel, it dang well do begin with un. (Please don't take my interest in upside-down spelling as some sort of disrespect. Consider my e-mail address). Ethan also asks, seriously or not, "Hey, does that lessen the number of clues needed?" Uuu.... Greg (#695) mentioned, of Ms. Upton's poise, "As it is, she got an A+ in looking good and an F in addressing a real problem." Which was the point of my Attorney General remark. Nonetheless, I think that an eighteen-year-old might be cut some slack in deciding that you've got to give up and ask to have the question repeated, especially on her first Teevee appearance (which she said it was on the "Today" segment. But maybe I'm being overcredulous). Thanks to Peter Erwin (#696) for clarifying the demographic question. Dave Bell (#702) I think you want "inculcated". Mary Dell (#703) we're all facetious, of course, and I understood what you meant. I was just saying that "dysmorphia" would have to be about bad shape. "Eumorphia" would be good shape, while "anamorphia" would be distorted shape. abi (#708) You wrote the sonnet? I thought you wrote the double dactyl? Or is #640 a sonnet in disguise? I have to thank you for it, in any case, along with Xopher for #699. We can only hope. --- Making Light: SFWA: DMCA abusers ::: September 06, 2007, 04:02 PM I can't get over the fact that this idiocy was perpetrated by the inventor of "Shades of Grey". If he had referred to his work as "Shades of Purple-grey" he would have been all over himself.* --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 06, 2007, 04:12 PM ixuey+ (h1L# 'E1L#) !qe --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 06, 2007, 04:27 PM Paula, Greg, why don't we play it like in Marienbad*, where the one who gets the last word loses? --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 06, 2007, 04:35 PM ethan (#715, #716) I'm gobsmacked. I never heard of Scruffy the Cat before, nor even the concept of upside-down insults. I was just making sure that you knew I was playing, because some people are touchy about their names. Thanks so much for the link, cause that's some weird lyric. --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 06, 2007, 04:56 PM '(Deu +ou 'uep s,+! pue) '1ZL# ,aydoX I agree perfectly, and if this makes me lose I'll count myself lucky it's over. --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 06, 2007, 05:50 PM Trip the Space Parasite, that's it! A leap inch! --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 06, 2007, 08:17 PM ethan (#735): I mean uep, not ued. I know I started it, but I propose a moratorium on writing upside down. Nobody's any good at it, even me (I've just been proofing my stuff like mad, and hoping Xopher doesn't take exception to being called Xophe' 'cause I can't do rs without dipping into the Hebrew block, and that stuff goes right-to-left and really weirds me out). And it seems like prolonged proofreading might cause motion sickness, without the motion. Worse, we might have some Light Maker drop a display on their head or something. That would create a great disturbance in the fluorosphere. But I'll second Xopher's request for the good news. We could all use some. I just hope it's not the stuff about Jesus, which I've already heard enough. --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 07, 2007, 07:10 AM Yay ethan, that's not diffuse, not vague, and not JC. Complicated, yes, but to change something like life you need complicated, or at least complicatable. So hooray for your prospects, and remember those beautiful words we just got from Tim Walters (#744) in another context: [...]not at all in the way I expected... but then I didn't expect it to be the way I expected[...]. You might even get a leg up on the copywriting, information architecture, and Library Science stuff during the downtimes between now and May. --- Making Light: Display dumps ::: September 07, 2007, 08:19 AM What abi danced, #114 and #118. And nobody can dance spammy like my sister abi. But this isn't showing up in the Recent posts list. Have our hosts put a filter on the Recent posts list that blocks spam announcements? --- Wikipedia Talk:Cahokia/Archive 1 Statements by (Marburg72) I've updated the text to reflect the fact that the controversy exists. The best online documentation of this controversy I know of is this talk page, which contains statements by apparent experts on both sides of the issue. Since this talk page may veer from that topic, I linked to the latest edit by Kbh3^rd. I don't know how to make a wikilink to a particular version of a page, so I used an http link. Feel free to fix that, but please don't omit the existence of a controversy, since that is quite relevant to the state of the mound. -Dan Hoey 14:32, 7 September 2007 (UTC) --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 07, 2007, 03:40 PM hedgehog (#786) mentioned the short story "/Dekabrach/ (Jack Vance, except I can't google it, help!)" There is, oddly enough, a mention of "A Dekabrach Called Wanda" in a discussion comparing someone's mental image of the Pnume/Phung gait to John Cleese. But I also found "decabrach" in an online Russian translation entitled "\320"\320\260\321EUR \320\261\320\276\320\273\321'\321 f\320\275\320\276\320\262," which AltaVista translates as "The Gift of the Chatterers," probably the good vodka/rotten meat version of "The Gift of Gab". That was published in Astounding in September, 1955, and collected in the Jack Vance Treasury and Silverbob's Alpha 3. I forget where to find a better bibliography, so there may be other sources. --- Making Light: Talk, don't spin ::: September 07, 2007, 03:59 PM If good news can summon hysterical laughter, it stands to rights that hysterical laughter can summon good news. Merry Xmas! --- Making Light: Talk, don't spin ::: September 07, 2007, 04:15 PM Ursula L (#109) says "'Someone screwed up' may not be grammatically passive, but it can be functionally passive when used in a crisis-management public announcement." Which is why banks, as described in P. G. Wodehouse's Psmith in the City,* employ firing-clerks, whose job is to be called on the carpet and summarily dismissed in front of irate customers. If the dressing- down is particularly vehement, the clerk may ask for a rise in pay. Which is just to say that telling us who screwed up may not be as valuable as we might hope. ______________ *or possibly Psmith, Journalist or some short story. But certainly Wodehouse's Psmith. --- Wikipedia talk:Requests for mediation/Danah Boyd Comment by Steve Riana, thank you again for inviting me in, and I must apologize if my reports of accusations of arrogance became accusations. I do believe that these accusations, while almost always unfounded, hurt Wikipedia's reputation for neutrality and accuracy. So I am somewhat moved by an effort to remove fuel from this particular fire. But there is another issue. I must disagree, at least partially, with the statement that "We are merely trying to tell ourselves how to write her name." We are also informing Wikipedia readers on how to write her name. In the case of a person who has made a significant effort to inform people on how she prefers her name to be written, our use of capitals in the article title informs our readers otherwise. We cite newspaper articles that use upper-case, but newspaper writers may check our page to see how her name is written, and may tend to use the title (especially when coupled with our stylistic use of capitals at the beginning of the article text) rather than follow the links to see that she has stated a marked preference for another. Thus, while I can accept the current article text, I still believe the article title should be renamed to lower-case. -Dan Hoey 16:22, 7 September 2007 (UTC) --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 07, 2007, 04:27 PM Jennifer Barber (#804) wrote, "And I can't believe that something I've got to deal with all the time at work just became useful on ML." That's because Information wants to be Useful, too. Maybe even moreso than Free. --- Wikipedia User talk:Kbh3rd Thanks for Cahokia edit I'd considered removing "recently", while I was there, but ended up unsure whether it imparted useful information. Next time I'll be encyclopedic and bold. I guess you don't see an improvement to the talk page link. By the way, I hope you don't mind me using "+" instead of your "add to talk page" button, but when I pressed the button I got switched to anonymous. Possibly that's because I use the secure connection, to protect my password. -Dan Hoey 17:23, 7 September 2007 (UTC) --- Making Light: More Republican gay bathroom sex ::: September 08, 2007, 08:40 AM MD\302\262 (#340) suggests providing separate but equal places for sex in airports. An article in the gay paper The Washington Blade quotes psychologists claiming that homophobic gays (like Larry Craig, apparently) seek sex in inappropriate places so that they can tell themselves they aren't gay. So providing assigned places of assignation probably wouldn't get him out of the WC. This is the fruit of the social stigmatization of gays, and Michael's (#329) best bet is to accept our collective responsibility for creating it and to embrace the participants. Only by removing the stigma can we help people like Larry choose to get their blow jobs from their husbands, as God would have intended. --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 08, 2007, 08:52 AM debcha (#833) I avoid NYT registration by getting a ticket in from Google. Of course, that's probably just as invasive to my privacy, but I can't seem to avoid Google. I guess there's the possibility that big G is selling my name, address, and browsing history to the Times. I'd better stop theorizing before I go into paranoid catatonia. --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 08, 2007, 03:48 PM Paula, please consider Bruce's observation from a personal point of view, as evidenced in this open thread. I respect and honor and thank you for taking the hint about the really virulent rant (not that you were solely responsible for it). Then there was the eighteen-year-old who I thought should be cut some slack for acting immaturely (#712). I wanted to respond to your ideas (#723) on it--I've greatly enjoyed some of our past conversations--but I didn't want to engage in an argument over whether someone in stage fright can look like a bimbo, or whether eighteen-year-olds bimbos can grow out of their bimbosity to become thoughtful, engaged adults. I'm glad your father lived at least a nigh-century, and I offer sympathy for your recent loss. But please consider whether constant rage is a good way to live your life. It so easily becomes a defense against engaging with people. You can concentrate on the your disagreements and ignore their message, and others may find it unpleasant enough to stop bothering with you (or if they do engage, we end up with the virulent, unending rant that gets nowhere). It sounds like Marshall Rosenberg's philosophy of nonviolent communication might help. I picked up Speak Peace in a World of Conflict to look at Rosenberg's ideas, and I have to say I didn't get very far. In part, I gave in to the irritation I feel with his style, which reads like it was written for morons. But I have just realized that I am demonstrating the very thing I am cautioning you against. So I'm going to felch my pride and read this now. And I hope you can find a way to get beyond your anger. Please try. You are worth more than that. --- Making Light: SFWA: DMCA abusers ::: September 08, 2007, 06:40 PM Dave Langford (#429): '...the group itself was then deleted, with email to the members explaining that as "As a gesture of goodwill, we have removed all the documents added to the copyright violation group."; (d) no document which I added or remember being added to that group has in fact been removed from Scribd. The experience is not wholly unlike being lied to.' Not wholly unlike, but not wholly like. I'd say it is the result of Scribd learning that they cannot accept even well-meant third-party takedown requests, since third parties may be uninformed of the copyright holder's intentions. I suspect they will accept first-party requests without proof of identity--have you had trouble getting your own work removed? What is missing is a way for a copyright holder to issue a blanket proxy for certain works to be removed upon discovery. The discovery of the works should probably be carried out automatically. --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 09, 2007, 07:12 AM (857,858,860): Braaains on a Plane. In-flight snacks of the living dead. Eight miles high, six feet under. Shambling in the sky. Coffee, tea, or thee. They're not getting any better. I think the first is best. --- Making Light: SFWA: DMCA abusers ::: September 09, 2007, 07:50 AM Clark E. Myers (#437): *536 - the result of Scribd learning that they *cannot* accept even well-meant third-party takedown requests, since third parties may be uninformed of the copyright holder's intentions* emphasis added. I would have said *need not* in the context myself.... Given what they have had to put up with over removing valuable, legitimate contributions on incompetent advice, I'll maintain ought not. They may not have a legal or contractual duty to keep stuff up, but their purpose is to make contributions available. Works containing mentions of an author's name or truly fair-use quotations from copyrighted works need protection from Burtification. --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 09, 2007, 01:46 PM debcha (#871) ... I'm afraid 'zaaaahmbies, on a jet plane' is the one that's been put on infinite loop on my mental stereo. You mean something like... The red-eye is quiet, it's half past ten. My guts are growling like angry men. Why don't you go to sleep and be my food? My body's undead, my hunger is great, I know what's just beneath your pate, Already I can taste the spinal fluid. So lean back and close your eyes, Nod off and I'll claim my prize, Your cranium holds everything I need. I'm a zombie on a jet plane, Don't want the drinks or nuts or multigrain Oh braaains, it's time to feed. I've always been able to nod off on a plane, until now. --- Making Light: Logic Puzzle (Open Thread 90) ::: September 11, 2007, 09:24 PM abi (#925) wrote 'No "Eaten on a jet plane", but it was my "Zombies on a jet plane" at 862 that started this entire regrettable* sequence. Dan Hoey then took another cut at it at 876.' Which is kind of embarrassing, because I completely missed 862, then debcha's comment at 871 looked like an inspiration that lacked a realization, for which I provided the sort of rough-hewn hack that can provide only faint praise to the brilliant 862. But this is a day of good news, because Anne had a coronary bypass today. Nothing can so improve a day as having my beloved survive open-heart surgery. I see there's a new open thread, but now I have sleep to go to. No more Making Light tonight. --- Making Light: Open thread 91 ::: September 12, 2007, 04:39 PM Xopher (253) and abi (256) felicitations, and I too am nil nisi bonum about a date on which my wife survived open-heart surgery (as I mentioned in OT90). In response to abi's question, the recovery is going very well at this point; she's getting out of the ICU on the early side and may be returning home before the weekend. Then it's 6-8 weeks of light duty while her sternum recovers from the lizziebordenation. All this arose from preparation for a hip replacement which, though postponed, will be safer with her ticker tocking on all cylinders. --- Wikipedia Talk:Kathryn Cramer Hugo Rules? What Pleasantville said about whether Charles Brown won a Hugo for SemiProzine, and what Swatjester's denial of it means. Such a statement is only true in a sense so superficial that by uttering it, he demonstrates a complete ignorance of what he is talking about. It is like someone writing articles claiming that World War I was caused by the assassination of the Archduke, or that dollars are not issued by the U. S. Government (on the basis that they are issued by Federal banks), or that either GWB or the GOP won the 2004 prez election but not both. It looks like something so apparent that it could be proved mathematically, but the first thing anyone learns about the subject is that things don't actually work that way. CNB won the SPmz Hugo, Locus won the SPmz Hugo, and the two statements are synonymous in the language as she is spoke. (Disclaimer: I have worked on Worldcons and voted on Hugo awards, but I'm pretty sure I never heard of any Denny Crane. I'm pretty sure Shatner has won a Hogu or two, even if the winner was listed as a novel.) -Dan Hoey 01:01, 14 September 2007 (UTC) --- Wikipedia Talk:Heterophone The merger of Heteronym and heterophone would be a good idea, though we may end up with a list of dueling definitions as at Homonym#Terminological confusion. -Dan Hoey 23:27, 27 October 2007 (UTC) --- Making Light: That topic ::: November 23, 2007, 06:38 PM Teresa(#4), thanks for sharing the love. If you hadn't asked, I might never have known of the beautiful crystals that can be found in barium ore. It seems to be mostly attested in French, so pardon mon fran\303\247ais if that's cheating. And these weird French soci\303\251t\303\251s mini\303\250res--who knew? I wonder if they are found in La Bretagne (Br*tt*n*), a near miss, but they do speak Br*t*n there, for the Celtic fans. --- Making Light: That topic ::: November 23, 2007, 07:36 PM For 310, I must accord apologies to Q. Pheevr (77), who got the Brtn lingo in there first, and so self-evidently. When I saw it, I fired up Leetkey and was startled to see sense only where it wasn't expected, so thanks also to John Stanning (80) for the link. I'm still unsure of the Indonesian cellphone thing, since it looks more like Indonesian Idol to my googling eyes. There's also a Belgian radio station, as Leighton mentioned in #11, and I thought I might add that they produced a modern dance film, Auchterland, relevant because its director and choreographer is another Teresa with spaces in her surname. --- Making Light: That topic ::: November 23, 2007, 08:32 PM So I sign off, turn on the radio, and what to my wondering ears? A Brtn, Nick Hornsby, talking about his new book, Slam, all about tn prgnc and brtn in Brtn. I didn't know you people had pwned NPR. And perhaps I shouldn't mention, re RichM's (108) mention of using dilute marmite in stew, that the full-strength product can be used as a personal lubricant for tight anatomical orifices. Dilate! Dilate! \302\241Ol\303\251! Let's hear it for the good doctor. --- Making Light: That topic ::: November 23, 2007, 08:37 PM Oops, that should be Nick Hornby. --- Newsgroups: rec.puzzles From: Dan Hoey Date: Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:14:09 -0500 Subject: Re: Kinda real-world puzzle Phil Carmody wrote: > Nick Atty <1-nos...@temporary-address.org.uk> writes: > > It's certainly not a situation that can exist in a stable > > population. > It is. There are two trivial examples. For a somewhat simplified example, consider a situation in which 1/N of those born never smoke and (N-1)/N of the people take up smoking as soon as they get access to fire and combustibles. Suppose the smokers all die at age 50 and the non-smokers all die at age 100, and that is the only time anyone dies. And suppose that people have enough babies that the birth rate is exactly equal to the death rate. The population distribution for age 0-50 is flat, and is N times as high as the flat population distribution for age 50-100. And every year, N-1 times as many smokers die as non-smokers. Adding other kinds of death and smoothing out the statistics is an exercise for the reader, but this model has enough features to show the effect. Dan Hoey haoyuep@aol.com --- Newsgroups: rec.puzzles From: Dan Hoey Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2007 14:22:34 -0500 Subject: Re: Kinda real-world puzzle CBFalconer wrote: > Dan Hoey wrote: >> For a somewhat simplified example, consider a situation in >> which 1/N of those born never smoke and (N-1)/N of the >> people take up smoking as soon as they get access to >> fire and combustibles. >> Suppose the smokers all die at age 50 and the non-smokers all >> die at age 100, and that is the only time anyone dies. And >> suppose that people have enough babies that the birth rate >> is exactly equal to the death rate. > Minor problem. Very few women are capable of childbirth at age 50. I don't see how you find that a problem, however minor. I never intended this to be more than a sketch to show that it is possible for death rates among smokers to be arbitrarily higher than for non-smokers in a stable population. Even at that, I never specified at what age anyone gives birth, only that there are enough births to balance the deaths. If it makes you feel better, stipulate that all children are born to women aged twenty, twenty-five, and thirty. You may assign this duty arbitrarily among those ages, and to smokers or non-smokers as you wish, as long as one child is born per young person (or two per young woman, if the gender ratio is 50%). As long as that remains constant, the population will be stable. Dan Hoey haoyuep@aol.com --- Newsgroups: rec.puzzles From: Dan Hoey Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:45:33 -0500 Subject: Re: Uniform Distribution of Points on The Surface of a Sphere Bill wrote: > What is meant by the "uniform distribution of points on the surface of > a sphere"? > IMHO, it means that every great circle contains as many points as > every other great circle. I take it you want to define what characteristic of a finite set of points on the sphere would constitute uniformity. Your criterion does not make any sense I can see as written, as we can certainly find great circles that do not contain any of the points. One might interpret your condition as requiring that every _hemisphere_ contains as many points as any other--that is, that every great circle divides the set in half--but that would not make for a good criterion. We could place all our points in the arctic and antarctic and still satisfy that criterion. The usual criterion for uniformity (on the sphere, as in any space of finite measure) is that every _small_ disc contain a number of points proportional to its area. This is not possible to achieve exactly, but can be approximated when as the number of points gets large. Two common methods are Monte Carlo and Bucky Fuller. Dan --- Newsgroups: rec.puzzles From: Dan Hoey Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2007 10:12:20 -0500 Subject: Re: Enigma 1446 - Crossed words Chappy wrote: > Enigma 1446 - Crossed words > New Scientist magazine, 27 October 2003. > by Susan Denham. Thanks for the nice puzzle. I get Across: Down: 1. What he said. 1. Has vapors. 5. These things. 2. Radical. 7. Plastic band leader. 3. Ired. 8. One of those times. 4. Park rate. 9. Mister. 6. Follows primer. 10. Vetos. 12. Tiny colonist. 11. Worshiper. 13. Strange visitors. Dan --- Making Light: Open thread 98 ::: December 25, 2007, 03:21 PM Jurassic parking meter men read gauges on the quay For conèd powers meteor bits falling in the spray The same wassail that's better warm when cold is still okay And the dinos block drafts and muffle the noise, muffle the noise, So our singing aloud no neighbor annoys. --- Wikipedia User talk:CharlesGillingham/Archive 1 Responded to your 1-month old question about Combinatorial game theory I was away even longer, and didn't see your question until a few days ago. I'd say David Eppstein's take on the problem is better than anything I could come up with. The fusion of AI and CGT--if it can be accomplished--is awaiting someone's OR. -Dan Hoey 20:00, 28 December 2007 (UTC) ---