Monthly Archives: January 2008

New FoS Stories

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This is what happens when you don’t receive submissions for awhile. You neglect to check for new entries, and so you end up with a couple in the queue that you didn’t know about. But it also means is that “Flashes of Speculation”:http://fs.shamuswrites.com has two new stories up today – one from new contributor Linda Courtland about a kidnapping, and another from veteran FoS contributor Rod Drake about a secret mission of Sherlock Holmes. Go read, and leave a few comments for the authors!

Math-erwocky

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Ok, so in my Real Analysis class, we’re finally getting down into the nitty-gritty of discussing mathematical grammar for proofs. We’ve been discussing statements and their negations, converses, and contrapositives. We began with two statements:

P: I eat it.
Q: I see it.

Now, if we combine the two statements, so that P implies Q, we get:

bq. If I see it, then I eat it.

or

bq. I only eat it if I see it.

If we flip them so that Q implies P, we get:

bq. I eat everything I see.

or

bq. I only see it if I eat it.

Our professor called this his Lewis Carroll example. I loved it.

Comment Graffiti

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Sometimes I wish that everything was commentable – blog-style. Let’s start with the Internet. Let’s make every web page be built in such a way that you can click on any spot on the screen and write a comment. It would probably cause most web pages to look like the underside of a highway overpass or the walls of a men’s restroom, but you could build these comment fields to be collapsible so they don’t look quite so ugly.

And once we’ve conquered the Internet completely in this way, let’s move on to real life. Let’s make posters, billboards, fliers, advertisements, etc. commentable as well. Let’s use a technology that makes all these items interactive to the average passerby, allowing folks to have discussion and dialogue as they go. It’d be a little bit like the “[citation needed]“:http://biphenyl.org/blog/2008/01/01/citation-needed/ graffiti, except much more expansive (and more acceptable).

There have been more than a few times I’ve wanted to comment on something written on a particular web page or even on a flier stuck to a bulletin board somewhere without the means to actually do so. Granted, a lot of such things end up as topics here ultimately, but I just think it would be kind of cool and fun if all of life was interactive on that level. Of course, we could all possibly simply go insane with sensory input, too.

Prologue Theme

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WordPress and Twitter fans, rejoice! Now available: “Prologue”:http://wordpress.com/blog/2008/01/28/introducing-prologue/, a Twitterlike theme for WordPress that’s ideal for groups of 3-15 to post short updates to each other. Downside: if you don’t have access to SVN, you have to download each theme file separately, since the boys at Automattic neglected to bundle them in a tidy .zip file. (Source: “Matt”:http://ma.tt/2008/01/twitter-theme/)

xkcd On Barack Obama

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“xkcd has a rare political post”:http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/01/28/obama/ today about why Barack Obama may well be the best presidential candidate we have this election cycle because of his commitment to open government. It’s a compelling read, and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on it. (Comments are closed on that entry, but please feel free to bring thoughts and comments back here. Seriously, I’m curious…)

0.999999…

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I’m really, really enjoying my Real Analysis class. My inner math geek has been riding on a cloud of euphoria for the last three weeks, and I finally have a good excuse to play with and learn 

LaTeX

, something I’ve wanted to do since I was first introduced to it in my undergraduate calculus classes several years back. I’ve already learned a handful of really cool little algorithms for manually calculating certain number sets that we take for granted because we have calculators that do these things for us now. It’s been a fun ride so far, and I still have about 3.5 months left to jones over all this math-y goodness.

On the very first day of class, our professor ((Bless his heart – he’s not the greatest teacher in the world. He definitely knows his stuff, but he does have some trouble presenting it in a clear manner.)) opened a can of worms that continues to pop up in our analytical operations. He had everyone break up into groups and then wrote a group activity on the board for us to discuss:

bq. Is 

0.overline{9} = 1

?

In case you’re a bit rusty on your math notation, that’s a zero and decimal point, followed by 9s _ad infinitum_. My initial gut reaction was to say that no, 0.999999… is _not_ equal to 1, that it’s infinitely close to 1 without ever actually reaching 1. But of course, when you think about that for half a second, you have to wonder how you can ever get infinitely close to something without touching it. I was incorrectly thinking in terms of asymptotes, like the equation 

y = frac{1}{x}

, which is a pair of curved lines that _do_ approach the x and y axes without ever touching. But 0.999999… is a _straight line_ when graphed, and not the curved line of the aforementioned equation. And if you graph 0.999999…, you’ll see no discernable difference between it and a graphed line of 1 – because the two are the exact same number. They’re just different ways of writing the same number.

Our prof pointed us at “this math blog”:http://polymathematics.typepad.com/polymath/2006/06/no_im_sorry_it_.html, where the author has a series of five entries with proofs showing clearing that 0.99999… is equal to 1 – and lots of discussion in the comments about the validity of said proofs. It’s very interesting to read down through everything, even through the trolling comments of naysayers, because the interactions and ensuing discussions turn up a lot of really good mathematical equations and proofs. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I highly recommend that you check it out and even add Polymathematics to your feed reader. ((There haven’t been any updates since 24 December, but I’m hoping that he’ll come back soon with some more juicy math goodness.))

So, are your eyes all glazed over now? Anyone still with me?

LaTeX vs. Latex

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I’m on a mailing list for a 

LaTeX

newsgroup, so I receive a digest of new postings a couple of times a day. I was skimming through the new messages in my Gmail inbox a few moments ago when some of the Google-placed ads and helpful links, which I usually ignore into invisibility, caught my eye. Check it out:

latex
Click for larger view

I’m actually kind of amused by the listing. It’s one of those times where you really wish Google’s search API would actually take case-sensitivity into account. I think they got it closer to correct with the ‘More About…’ links, but still, I’m scared to click on anything since I don’t actually know where they go.

Popular Elections – Not What You Think

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I love today’s Non-Sequitur: ((Though I have to admit that most days I do find the comic just plain strident.))

Non-Sequitur

It _does_ seem like we elect government officials based on emotions and popularity and how pretty we think they are, rather than electing them based on whether or not they’re actually qualified for the job.

I don’t really care much for politicians. By and large I think they’re all a bunch of crooks and liars. I’m sure that most of them have convinced themselves that they have the best interests of their constituents in mind, but I think they just like to tell themselves beautiful lies to justify poor judgment and bad decisions. It seems to me that the honest politician who is wise in his decision-making, aware of his constituents’ needs, and sensitive to those needs and desires is a truly rare breed. I also think that this type of politician, the one with true integrity, also rarely makes it to a higher political office where he (or she) is most needed, possibly because the other screwed up politicians make it impossible to do so. And so our political system suffers under the clumsy paws of unqualified leaders while the good ones are kept under boot and heel.

I know, I know – this is a very cynical outlook on politics in our country, but the more I see of politics in general and politicians in particular, the more disgusted I become with the antics. They still remind me more of a bunch of squabbling 8-year-olds fighting over a ball on the playground rather than grown adults who _should_ have enough sense and maturity to behave like the leaders of one of the most powerful nations on Earth.

Of course, we really only have ourselves to blame for our leaders since most people don’t really seem to care two bits about the qualifications of their candidates, choosing instead to focus on how much they _seem_ like they’d be good for the job.

Ok, this is my one political rant for the year. I’m good to go until 2009. As you were.