Gentlemen Prefer Blogs
HOLY CRAP I haven’t laughed this hard in like 500 years.
A constrained writing technique called N+7 (or sometimes S+7), invented by Jean Lescure, a member of Ouliop, “involves replacing each noun in a text with the seventh one following it in a dictionary.”
I found a site that does this for any block of text you enter, and will actually do N+1 (one word following the original in the dictionary) to N+15. Things get pretty funny pretty quickly with almost any text, but if you want a hilarious example, read the Lolita example. Oh my god. The excerpt keeps getting funnier the further out the words go from the original.
- Lolita, lighter of my lifeboat, firearm of my loincloths.
- Look at this tango of thoroughfares.
- My sing, my soup.
- Look at this tannery of threesomes.
- Look at this tantrum of three-wheelers.
- Did she have a prefix? She did, indeed she did.
- You can always countersign on a mussel for a farmhouse protectorate subgroup.
- My siphon, my soviet.
I think I’m going to have a brain aneurism from laughing so hard.
Bitz n’ Thingz
1. School + Peoples
It took awhile to get into this semester for me, but now everything seems to be falling into place nicely (and will hopefully stay that way).
Also, math people are bundles of nerdy fun. Last semester I was taking classes that were mostly full of CS people and…ugh. Our personalities did not mesh at all. But there are several people—especially in Linear Algebra and Proofs—who I talk to on a regular basis. Which is a pretty rare thing for me.
2. Advertising
This is the cutest freaking commercial ever, even though I don’t think it’s intended to be.
Must…CREATE!
NNNNNNNF I want to WRITE but I have NO IDEAS WHATSOEVER. I’m terrified about our next story due in Fiction.
ZERO.
IDEAS.
Of course, I didn’t have any ideas until two days before my first story was due and I managed to crap something out, so who knows.
Also, this anxiety needs to die.
AAAAAAAAAAA BLOG TITLE!
IT’S A HEART! I’M REALLY HYPER THAT’S WHY YOU GET ALL CAPS.
FX
Being social is freaking draining. So screw that.
Instead, this:
I watched this like two days ago and I DREAMT ABOUT IT last night. Weird.
[Edit: good lord, this went viral. It had like 23,000 views when I saw it.]
Sorry, nothing else to say. As I’ve mentioned (and as you’ve probably noticed), my blog posts tend to deteriorate as school takes over my life. They’ll come back, I promise.
The Cosmic Osmo Appreciation Post
So today I’m going to talk about this game:
This is the opening screen from Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel. It’s almost as old as I am (published in 1989) and is pretty much the only non-shooter game I grew up with (unless you count Spin Doctor as well).
Says Wiki: “There is no goal, no system of scoring points, and nothing that the player can keep in an inventory. A player can be said to have “finished” the game if they’ve explored every area and found every secret, but the game gives no feedback to indicate whether this has happened. Although this is unconventional, it allows finding new secrets to be a genuine surprise, while avoiding the frustration of endlessly searching the game for the last secret to achieve 100% completion.”
And it’s a big game, especially for 1989. And look at these awesome black and white screenshots:
You can buy Cosmic Osmo on Steam (for pretty cheap, I think). I totally recommend it.
And happy birthday, Matt!
Poopz
I don’t care if no one else who reads this likes YouTube Poop, I do. And this one is fantastic.
(I’ve been obscenely anxious lately; things like this kind of deaden it.)
SPOT IT
Okay, how beautiful IS this?
It’s a visible-light image of the sun—specifically, a sunspot. This and the other images found here (which is also the source for the image above) were captured by the New Solar Telescope. The New Jersey Institute of Technology built the NST to specifically study the activity of the sun.
YAY!
Check out the other pics on the site!
(Sorry my blogs are so short; I’m already busy.)
A Slight Deviation from my “200 Books” List
I finished reading this today:
(Beautiful cover or beautiful cover?)
I’ve pretty much decided that my favorite time period/place has to be mid 16th- to mid 17th-century Europe. The intelligence that poured out of that region of the world during that time is downright ridiculous, not to mention the interactions of all the main intellectual players of the period: Newton, Leibniz, Kepler, Hooke, Pascal, Halley, Pepys, and Descartes, to name a few.
Edward Dolnick’s The Clockwork Universe is a pretty great discussion of how all these dudes—Newton, mainly—helped in the formation of the new methods of thought that developed during this time. There’s talk about the bubonic plague, there’s talk about Galileo, there’s talk about the various attempts to explain why the planets orbited the sun in ellipses rather than circles…and, of course, there’s talk about the Royal Society and how it got its start. The calculus debate’s in there, too, ’cause how could it not be?
The book ends with a rather beautiful little compendium of both facts and anecdotes about how the Principia truly impacted the scientific world, which I think was actually my favorite part of the book (apart from the little author’s note in the end where Dolnick proclaims proudly that he’s a Leibniz fan. Rock on!).
I recommend it if you’re at all interested in that fascinating period of time.
ALRIGHTY
Let’s put my 10,000 Days goal into some perspective: I am approximately 25.5 years old. Do you know how many days I’ve been alive?
9,340, counting today.
Nine thousand, three hundred and forty days.
So if I had been blogging from the day I was born, I still wouldn’t have reached my goal yet.
That is like eight levels of psycho.
As it stands, I’ve got about 20 years of blogging to go before I hit 10,000 posts. That is a long, long time, my friends. Think it’ll happen? I hope so!
(Haha, sorry, I don’t have anything exciting to talk about today.)
In This Blog: Wikipedia Gets Sassy about the Kilogram
I’ve talked about the kilogram quite a bit on here, but I want to revisit it a bit. Mainly because of Wikipedia’s sassy little remark about the International Prototype Kilogram (IPK).
The other six base SI units (second, meter, ampere, Kelvin, mole, and candela), which used to be based on physical artifacts, are now defined in terms of physical constants for precision’s sake. For example, the meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the meridian through Paris between the North Pole and the Equator. It is currently defined as the distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
Only the kilogram remains to be redefined in this new, more precise way.
The IPK itself is a small little cylinder of platinum/iridium and is stored in Sèvres, France. It is the internationally recognized artifact that is defined as having a mass of exactly one kilogram. So it is, in essence, the kilogram.
But of course, there are copies of it. Sèvres holds three; other nations have national prototypes. And that’s where things get interesting.
Wiki: “By definition, the error in the measured value of the IPK’s mass is exactly zero; the IPK is the kilogram. However, any changes in the IPK’s mass over time can be deduced by comparing its mass to that of its official copies stored throughout the world, a process called ‘periodic verification.'”
“Beyond the simple wear that check standards can experience, the mass of even the carefully stored national prototypes can drift relative to the IPK for a variety of reasons, some known and some unknown.”
And what does this drift look like? the IPK itself is the line at zero denoted with the K. The other lines represent the mass changes in various national prototype kilograms.
Well, hell. And the IPK itself, Wiki notes, may be changing as well (and likely is), though it is still the “base” against which every other national prototype is compared.
Yup, humans have been to the moon but can’t figure out how to keep the kilogram constant. I find that hilarious.
But here’s where I lost it when reading this article:
“The magnitude of many of the units comprising the SI system of measurement, including most of those used in the measurement of electricity and light, are highly dependent upon the stability of a 134-year-old, golf ball-size cylinder of metal stored in a vault in France.”
Ooooh, Wiki…a bit of attitude, eh?
My mom can attest to the fact that I laughed about this for like 10 minutes straight.
(all pics from Wiki’s Kilogram page)
CLASSES!
Classesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclasses
classesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclasses
classesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclassesclasses!!
*Deep breath*
I’m back, bitches! Here’s the rundown:
Probability (STAT 451): This is the class I’ve been waiting for. I think this will be the one where calculus and stats will finally mate in a glorious orgy of bell curves and integrals.
Linear Algebra (MATH 330): I really think I’ll get more out of it this time, especially since Dr. Abo is awesome and I like the way he teaches. Plus there were three of us who got there early and we kind of bonded into a “let’s study together” group, so that’s cool.
Advanced Fiction (ENGL 492): After writing non-fic almost exclusively for quite some time now, it’s going to be interesting to switch back. But I’m excited! I love writing and I love reading others’ stories.
Numerical Linear Algebra (MATH 432): Hmm…not sure about this one. Today we just talked about some of the problems we were going to solve, including ones involving least squares methods and singular value decomposition. I’ve used both of those things in the context of multivariate stats, but never in depth. Though our professor did ask us what were some characteristics of a non-singular matrix and we all kind of hesitated before answering, so hopefully that means that we’re all at least on the same page as far as our familiarity with (or memory of) linear algebra goes.
Intro to Higher Math (MATH 215): Why are 200-level classes the most difficult ones? I’ve never understood that. Anyway, I foresee this being similar to Symbolic Logic (that’s code for insane amounts of work). I’m excited, though. And if I can make it through, I can take advanced calculus (Math…471? I think?) next spring! *flailing*
END!
An Ode to a (Semi-)Productive Summer
The academic summer is officially over in an hour! Let’s review the goals I specified in May (or June or whenever):
- Actually study for the GRE/GRE math subject test. FAIL. Loser.
- Rock calculus. DONE!
- Rock summer teaching. DONE!
- Go back up to Vancouver and walk the hell out of that city. FAIL. We were going to go up there, but plans fell through.
- Figure out what’s going down next fall as far as teaching goes. DONE!
- Figure out what’s going down for the rest of my life as far as everything goes. Uh…working on it?
- Hit at least 1000 walking miles. DONE!
- Thoroughly delve into Antognazza’s Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography. DONE! <3
- Reacquaint myself with my old linear algebra notes. I looked over them a few times and decided to take linear algebra again, so DONE sort of?
- Possibly visit Sean? FAIL. Too expensive. I’m sad.
- Spend a weekend doing absolutely nothing but Minecraft/drawing/sitting in my basement away from everyone. I don’t think I actually spent a whole weekend in the house. GOTTA WALK! So…FAIL?
- Research possible graduate schools (AGAIN, UGH). DONE! Canada’s on my radar again.
- A few other things that are private. ALL OF THESE WERE FAIL
Maybe it wasn’t as productive as I thought. But I did get Phase I of a big project done (which is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time) and am currently on Phase II, so that’s kind of good.
Haha, thanks, Google.
Yes. Yes I have.
No shame.
Anyway, completely changing topics…
I mention Achievement Hunter quite a bit on here. There are a few reasons for this.
- Listening to them game is like living in the house with the guys again. It’s hilarious.
- This sounds super dorky, but they kept me company over the summer. I didn’t have any friends around and they put out YouTube videos at least 5 times a week, so…that was that.
- They’re one of the funniest YouTube channels out there, in my opinion. Grown men cussing each other out playing video games is fantastic.
Since starting doing Let’s Plays of Minecraft back in 2012, they’ve done 65 half-hour (or longer) episodes, many featuring the Tower of Pimps.
Well check out the latest Minecraft update:
Pretty cool! Congrats, guys. And seriously, check them out (if excessive cursing doesn’t bother you, haha).
Book Review: Around the World in Eighty Days (Verne)
Have I read this before: Indeed! In high school, I think? I can’t remember exactly.
Review: Good lord, I love this book. Jules Verne’s characters are always awesome, but not a single one of them is more awesome than Phileas Fogg. I think he is my favorite literary character (with the possible exception of Captain Queeg).
“He was so exact that he was never in a hurry, was always ready, and was economical alike of his steps and his motions. he never took one step too many, and always went to his destination by the shortest cut.; he made no superfluous gestures, and was never seen to be moved or agitated. He was the most deliberate person in the world, yet always reached his destination at the exact moment.”
“…Mr. Fogg stopped him, and, turning to Sir Francis Cromarty, said, ‘Suppose we save this woman.’
‘Save the woman, Mr. Fogg!’
‘I have yet twelve hours to spare, I can devote them to that.’
‘Why, you are a man of heart!’
‘Sometimes,’ replied Phileas Fogg, quietly; ‘when I have the time.'”
How can you not love a character like that, seriously?
As for the plot itself, it’s pretty much classic Verne. I love how he’s always throwing his characters into seemingly impossible-to-remedy situations and then he’s like “AND SUDDENLY AN ELEPHANT” or something else and it saves the day. I reiterate from past blogs: Verne is awesome. And this is my favorite of his books (though re-reading 20,000 Leagues made me realize just how badass that one was, too).
Favorite part: “Stop the train, we need to have an emergency duel!” Nothing says “defending your honor” like wanting to use a brief stop at a train station to duel to the death. And, failing at that, nothing says “no seriously, I gotta defend my honor!” like ushering passengers out of a train car so that you can utilize said car for a duel to the death. Oh, Jules.
Rating: 9.5/10
Oooh
So here are pictures of shirts that I want need.
That “Stoked” one? Oh my god I want it. They have women’s shirts, too, so it might have to happen. The “Extended Hospitalization” one is pretty fantastic, too.
All from here.
Element 2
Well what the hell.
Thanks to a discussion I had with my mom yesterday concerning blue moons, I of course had the moon as the main star of my dream last night.
In the dream, it was the point in the future where our helium reserves had run out (real thing that’s happening, by the way). The top scientists had determined that mining the moon for helium was our most feasible option for replenishing the element, so we’d sent up a bunch of scientists/miners to do so. We’d set up these huge plots on the moon in which we mined the helium.
All was well and good, but as we started carting the helium back to earth, we realized that taking the element from the moon’s surface was actually eliminating the moon’s ability to reflect the sun. It had gotten to the point where the mining plots were resulting in huge black non-reflecting squares on the moon’s surface that could be seen from earth.
Representative pic (made with MS Paint so it’s crappy, but this is really what it looked like in the dream. Original from here):
I actually think the dream itself lasted like 2 minutes, but I remember feeling like we’d been waiting for days for the news to report whether the reflective nature of the moon would ever return in full or if we’d have to live with a patchy satellite.
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeird.
Book Review: The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas)
Have I read this before: Yes. Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away (junior high).
Review: Actually, I don’t know where I was when I read this, ‘cause I swear I only remember the “breaking out of prison” part. From this whole magnificent book, that’s the only part I remembered. That happened like in the first 100 pages! What the hell, younger me.
Anyway.
Look at this chart of the character relationships in this book and tell me this isn’t a soap opera in novel form.
A LOT happens in this book, but it’s really hard to summarize without giving it all away. For some reason it strikes me as almost a little bit Princess Bride-ish in parts, but maybe that’s ‘cause Dantes is really good at keeping his cool (most of the time).
Favorite part: Hmm…probably the whole “why is everybody getting poisoned? Who is poisoning everybody?! ENOUGH WITH THE POISONING JEEZ!” part. You know what I’m talking about if you’ve read it.
Rating: 7.5/10
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