Shtetl-Optimized had a really nice post called What Google Won’t Find. It’s not really about Google, but it contains a really nice summary of P=?NP for people not familiar with it and some basic results about quantum computing which were new to me.
Naturally I’m sympathetic to people embarrassing themselves on camera, but this beauty pageant video is pretty funny.
I’m amazed how much linguistic analysis there’s been about what she said. Language Log had two articles in the last two days about it Syntax Under Pressure, and What She Should Have Said
And here’s one person’s attempt at a syntactic parse:
(I would have parsed it differently, but there is a lot of ambiguity in there 
)
The quotation (a slightly different transcription than the parse’s)
I personally believe
that
U.S. Americans are unable to do so
because uh some uh
people out there in our nation don’t *have* maps
and uh I believe that our ed- education like such as in
South Africa and uh the- the Iraq everywhere like such as and
I believe that they should uh
our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or- or- should help South Africa
and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries
so we will be able to build up our future
((for our children))
Mike Love posted an article about the internet “threatening” to change the way we speak. I posted a mini-rant in the comments — I agree that there can be language constructions that are less ambiguous or more efficient, but when prescriptivists start talking about preserving the beauty or integrity of language it really makes me angry.
The thing that really struck me from the article were the lines:
The words’ growing offline popularity has stoked the ire of linguists, parents and others who denounce them as part of a broader debasement of the English language… Some suggest such verbal creations are nothing new and are integral to how language evolves.
This looks a lot like the language the same Wall Street Journal uses in its infamous op-eds denying global climate change: it’s hard to find a perfect example since you need a subscription to read full articles, but check out Kyoto by Degrees (and RealClimate’s rebuttal.)
They don’t cite a single linguist in the article, and I’m pretty sure there are no linguists where I work that would deny that language evolves. So I guess the “some” in “some suggest such verbal creations…” is technically true since ∀x P(x) => ∃x P(x), but it’s incredibly misleading.
I know after Spellbound and Word Wars, documentaries of quirky competitions are becoming kind of cliche, but King of Kong was one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen.
Also in the “docs about autistic people and their interests” genre, BBS: The Documentary was really fascinating. It’s around ten hours long, but I spent a whole weekend watching it completely engrossed. If anyone wants to borrow it let me know :).
Language Log had another great post on newspaper’s expletive policies.
This quotation from the WSJ is my favorite:
Also, the filmmakers added new scenes to the film, including one where Mr. [Samuel L.] Jackson’s character delivers an exclamation similar to one a sound-alike had uttered in a fan trailer. In it, Mr. Jackson repeatedly uses an Oedipal expletive to describe both the snakes and the plane.
My coworker Brendan found a shockingly bad SQL injection exploit on ConnectU’s advanced search page, and wrote up a pretty entertaining blog post where he does a little analysis of what passwords people were using.
Brendan’s somewhat mocking description of all this was found and posted to Valleywag. The excerpt they chose has a quote from our coworker David, who calls the exploit “shameful”. Apparently David got multiple emails from employees of ConnectU bitching at him, and even former coworkers wrote to him to tell him not to be so negative. It reminds me of when my infamous video was posted there and I got about a thousand emails from former colleagues in a matter of hours…
Brendan flames me all the time, so it was nice to see other people feeling his wrath :), and I have to say I think these guys deserved it. I don’t know which is more absurd, that Brendan found the injection because his name has an apostrophe or that they were storing passwords in plain text. But we better make sure that when we launch we don’t have any embarrassing security holes.
Apparently the New York Times had a policy where they would only print the word shit when a president said it. According to Language Log they quietly violated this policy for the first time yesterday. Fascinating…
How did I miss this op-ed written by seven soldiers in Iraq.
It ends:
In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.
Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.
We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.
I wonder if there were or will by any repercussions.
I saw this over on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
It looks like they might have taken down the picture but you can see the original one on the author’s website.
Computational Complexity had a cute post linking to an article arguing that 2*pi is a more useful constant that pi.
The first two formulas that came to my mind involving PI (I think this reveals some of my biases…) were the Gaussian distribution and the Fourier transform which both use 2*PI. And I have to say I agree with the argument that computing angles as fractions of 2*PI radians is a pain. Gasarch has some good points in his blog too. And radius is so much more commonly used than diameter. It really does seem like 2*PI should be the thing everyone learns and memorizes.
Speaking of circumferences, I was having coffee with Brendan and used almost exactly the lines this guy uses in a YouTube video about how to win a free pint to get a free coffee out of him…