The Freshmen

September 1st, 2006

Working at a university, I can only say that The Freshmen is stunningly true.

On the first day of class he asks them a question. “What would you be doing if you were not in College?” They reply that they would be working in a retail store, construction, or at the paper mill in their hometown. “So you would be working 40 hours a week? Is that correct?” he says. They answer in the affirmative. He then goes on to guarantee that if they will work a 40-hour week in college, they will be successful. He asks them to “work” in their academic pursuits 8 hours a day, five days a week, with evenings and weekends off. The 40 hours must be spent either in class or in study time. He explains that if they would get up at 7 a.m., eat breakfast, and either attend class or study from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., with an hour off for lunch, they would have every evening off to socialize. They would also have their weekends free. He knows that this will work. He also knows that they won’t take his advice.

Cultural Implications of Respect for Law

September 1st, 2006

Interesting article on rules and rule breaking in the Moscow Times.

Put simply, Russians are used to not making a connection between breaches of rules and laws and their tragic consequences. Breaking the rules has long been a flourishing subculture that can be witnessed everywhere you turn.

The Moscow Times requires a pay subscription to read their content (sucks), but you can read more excerpts at Tom McMahon’s blog. Ignore the 4-block world thing, the content is below that.

This Just In: War Has Almost Ceased to Exist

August 10th, 2006

John Mueller, over at Ohio State University has a wonderful paper about the current phenomenon regarding the demise of war. He discusses the issue in detail, but being a political scientist (and student of Fred Astaire choreography), he doesn’t dwell long on the whole aspect of enconomic ties being a significant depressant to the desire for war. Regardless, the paper is a good, and heartening read. Especially in light of recent events.

Mueller is also the author of the False Sense of Insecurity paper that has been making the rounds of late. You can download many of his papers, and even a couple of his books off of his OSU web page.

Those Crazy Japanese

July 31st, 2006

Japanese TV FreaksOver at TV-In-Japan, aside from a crappy web layout, they have a clip from youtube that is an example of everything that is right and wrong with Japanese TV and culture. According to the comments, the user kazuhima has several more of the same available on his youtube account.

Drive Through Lube

July 10th, 2006

Drive through lube billboardsA delightfully suggestive advertisement by a lubricant company. Hell, it’s more than suggestive, it’s downright dirty.

California Republic Palomino

July 10th, 2006

Blackwing pencil testingI like a person who takes their pencils as seriously as ninthwave does.

In my search for a replacement of what I consider the best pencil ever manufactured, I needed to find a pencil that had at least these qualities established by the Blackwing 602:

1. Dark smooth graphite with a slightly waxy feel to it.
2. Graphite that doesn’t smudge easily (eliminating most grades over 4B).
3. Reasonably priced (i.e. not so rare that you have to buy at collctor’s prices).
4. Produced by a company with commitment to pencil quality (to avoid future heartbreak should they stop production on a whim).

Impure Mathematics

July 8th, 2006

Found, unfortunately un-attributed, on the internet.

To prove once and for all that math can be fun, we present: Wherein it is related how that paragon of womanly virtue, young Polly Nomial (our heroine) is accosted by that notorious villain Curly Pi, and factored (oh horror!!!)

Once upon a time (1/t) pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the boundary of a singularly large matrix. Now Polly was convergent, and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she must never enter such an array without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored this condition on the basis that it was insufficient and made her way in amongst the complex elements. Rows and columns closed in on her from all sides. Tangents approached her surface. She became tensor and tensor. Quite suddendly two branches of a hyperbola touched her at a
single point. She oscillated violently, lost all sense of directrix, and went completely divergent. As she tripped over a square root that was protruding from the erf and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she rounded off once more, she found herself inverted, apparently alone, in a non-Euclidean space.

She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. He wondered, “Was she still convergent?” He decided to integrate properly at once.

Hearing a common fraction behind her, Polly rotated and saw Curly Pi approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could see at once by his degenerate conic and dissipative that he was bent on no good.

“Arcsinh,” she gasped.

“Ho, ho,” he said, “What a symmetric little asymptote you have I can see you angles have lots of secs.”

“Oh sir,” she protested, “keep away from me I haven’t got my brackets on.”

“Calm yourself, my dear,” said our suave operator, “your fears are purely imaginary.”

“I, I,” she thought, “perhaps he’s not normal but homologous.”

“What order are you?” the brute demanded.

“Seventeen,” replied Polly.

Curly leered “I suppose you’ve never been operated on.”

“Of course not,” Polly replied quite properly, “I’m absolutely convergent.”

“Come, come,” said Curly, “let’s off to a decimal place I know and I’ll take you to the limit.”

“Never,” gasped Polly.

“Abscissa,” he swore, using the vilest oath he knew. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her significant places, and began smoothing out her points of inflection. Poor Polly. The algorithmic method was
now her only hope. She felt his digits tending to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever.

There was no mercy, for Curly was a heavyside operator. Curly’s radius squared itself; Polly’s loci quivered. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. After he cofactored, he performed runge - kutta on her. The complex beast even went all the way around and did a contour integration. What an indignity - to be multiply connected on her first integration. Curly went on operating until he completely satisfied her hypothesis, then he exponentiated and became completely orthogonal.

When Polly got home that night, her mother noticed that she was no longer piecewise continuous, but had been truncated in several places But it was to late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly’s denominator increased monotonically. Finally she went to L’Hopital and generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place and drove Polly to deviation.

The moral of our sad story is this: “If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom.”

Shuttle Launches Live in Linux

July 4th, 2006

Shuttle STS-121 LaunchToday the shuttle launched the shuttle Discovery on STS-121. The cool thing, though, was that I was able to easily watch it live, streaming under Linux.

All that I needed to do was go to the NASA TV streaming video page and view the windows media player stream. The stream uses the WMV9 codec (unfortunately), however if you have the right codec packs installed (win32), totem/xine can view the stream live.

Git, an alternative to CVS

July 3rd, 2006

Git is the Linus Torvalds implemented alternative to configuration management. IBM has a nice article introducing users to git based software development. The context is git’s current major usage which is as the revision control system for the Linux Kernel. Worth a look.

The current iteration of Git is intended primarily for use by software developers looking for alternatives to CVS or proprietary code management solutions. Git differs from CVS in a number of ways:

  • Branching is fast and easy.
  • Offline work is supported; local commits can be submitted later.
  • Git commits are atomic and project-wide, not per-file as in CVS.
  • Every working tree in Git contains a repository with a full project history.
  • No Git repository is inherently more important than any other.

Did somebody sell a Yahoo email database?

July 1st, 2006

A few years ago, around 2000, maybe 2001, I signed up with a yahoo account. This was so I could gain access to the yahoo games system and try out word racer. When I signed up I had to give yahoo an email address to confirm the account with. I use custom crafted email addressses which encode the site’s name in it so I can filter out companies that refuse to honor their unsubscribe/stop sending me junk options.

Other than the initial email to confirm the account, that address has never been used for anything–in general I use these addresses as receive only. And kindly, yahoo never used it again to send me spamvertising. Also, I haven’t played a yahoo game in about 3, maybe 4 years. Today, however, I received a spam to that address. This spam was clearly illegal junk spam, a 419, and so it clearly wasn’t condoned or sanctioned by yahoo, however it arrived at an address that existed for a one-time use to receive an email from Yahoo, and then again two years later for a password recovery (yeah, I forgot it).

This means that the existence of this address was only recorded in two places, my email archives in which the original was saved, and yahoo’s internal databases. Therefore, since my systems have not been compromised (I manage internet servers for a living, and track all activity in and out of my boxes), this means that someone with access to Yahoo’s internal listings of email addresses has sold/made available that list to illegal scammers. Not good.