I can’t stop playing this game shark runner. Basically it’s a silly flash game where you go around looking for sharks. But they use real world tagged sharks to determine the sharks location. And the game happens in real time (or SMS) so you get emails as your boat approaches a shark.
One of my scientists just got eaten by a shark…
I realized flying home that I hadn’t gone ten days without checking email since 1998. That seems kind of sad.
I was reading Cormac McCarthy and couldn’t stop thinking about how well our parser would work on his writing. He uses virtually no dependent clauses, hardly any anaphora, etc. If only he would add quotation marks.
Also, I learned that in Slavic languages voda is water and -ka is a diminutive. Pretty funny.
I’m leaving for Croatia today, so no blog posts for a while. In the meantime here’s some random stuff I thought was interesting:
I started reading about n-in-a-row games in arbitrary dimensions after I read this post on Good Math, Bad Math, and there are tons of fascinating results:
Gomoku (five in a row) has been proven to be a win for black on anything bigger than a 15×15 grid.
For any n-in-a-row and board length at least n, there is a dimension d where if the board is filled someone has to have won. This is true even for an arbitrary number of players.
There are more, but as I write this I’m thinking other people might not find them as interesting as me :).
It’s amazing how many Simpson’s writers have a math/cs background. I always wondered who came up with that joke in episode where Bart goes to a gifted school and they take the derivative of r^3/3 and it turns out to be r^2dr, which they rewrite as “r dr r” and laugh.
Apparently Chomsky famously wrote:
(1) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
(2) Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.. . . It is fair to assume that neither sentence (1) nor (2) (nor indeed any part of these sentences) has ever occurred in an English discourse. Hence, in any statistical model for grammaticalness, these sentences will be ruled out on identical grounds as equally `remote’ from English. Yet (1), though nonsensical, is grammatical, while (2) is not.
I’m not sure why, but nothing gets me more riled up than people making grandiose claims without checking them empirically. I mean it was 1957, and I’m sure he’s thinking of counting n-grams, but my god “any statistical model’ will do X??? This is just obviously wrong.
Fernando Pereira built a simple bigram model with a hidden variable proving this wrong, and wrote a nice paper about it.
Interesting graphical way of looking at multiplication.
If you try this with numbers with large digits, you will see why it’s not practical, but it definitely looks cool.
Just read an article in the NYT about how CEOs are becoming nearly as rich as CEOs in the late 1800s. The interactive graphic is especially cool.
I don’t have a strong knee jerk reaction against CEOs of public companies taking as much money as they can, but it’s amazing how hypocritical some them sound:
Mr. Griffin, 38, argued that those who focus on the money — and there is always a get-rich crowd — “soon discover that wealth is not a particularly satisfying outcome.”
And then a paragraph later:
“The income distribution has to stand,” Mr. Griffin said, adding that by trying to alter it with a more progressive income tax, “you end up in problematic circumstances. In the current world, there will be people who will move from one tax area to another. I am proud to be an American. But if the tax became too high, as a matter of principle I would not be working this hard.”
I think the part that made me the angriest was when they talked about donations at the end of the article:
The Weills — matching what everyone else pledged — gave $30 million to enhance the concert hall that Andrew Carnegie built in 1890 in pursuit of returning his fortune to the community, establishing a standard that today’s tycoons embrace.
How is funding pretentious art and filthy rich private universities an act of charity?
My coworker Brendan left a process running on a port I wanted to use, but had left for Amsterdam a few days ago. I killed the job, but it didn’t free the port. In fact it had come back with a different process id. I killed it again and it came back again. I was getting more and more frustrated and then I remembered that he was running a wrapper script that monitored the job and restarted the job if it crashed.
Lot’s of people have these scripts, but this particular one was given to him by another coworker David Fayram, who apparently wrote it in a response to an sysadmin who kept randomly killing off his jobs. He named it “unbreakable”
But what happens when the “unbreakable” process dies?
Apparently David has another script called “unkillable” that took this one step further. Instead of one process monitoring a child process and restarting the child when it goes down, unkillable starts a nest of processes that all watch each other and restart each other when any one node goes down.
What if Brendan had wrapped his process in unkillable? I honestly have no idea what I would do. Since you can only kill one job at a time it seems like you’re basically screwed, short of restarting the machine. I can’t imagine how angry that sysadmin must have been.
I always like Hal’s posts where he stems the names of conference papers and does frequency counts. The recent Three Words Long post where he plots trends in word frequency in ICML papers is pretty entertaining. The graph comparing knowledge and data is pretty striking. I would love to see this for more journals and more words.
Tufte might not approve of all the chart junk, but wow, someone at the Economist has a sense of humor:
My friend Steve sent me this link:
¿ʇı̣ əsnqɐ ʇ,uɐɔ noʎ ɟı̣ əpoɔı̣un sı̣ pooɓ ʇɐɥʍ and an autogenerator. It’s amazing how many glyphs Unicode contains.
In my old job working on Japanese search, I spent a lot of time dealing with weird character encodings. One of the crazier things is when you accidentally output one of the bidirectional output control codes:
For example if you make a webpage like this:
This text is ‮backwards
You get output like this:
This text is backwards
Try cutting and pasting that last quote into a text editor and see the weirdness that ensues…