gwillen

Someone pointed this out to me, and I felt the need to share it with you all.

Massive disclaimer: I don't agree with everything on this site. I find the tone condescending in some places, and the logic flawed in others. Certainly he should use the word "argument" instead of "proof", but presumably he wasn't targeting mathematicians when he made the site. And I have no intention of defending the site or its arguments in the comment thread, I just found it interesting. :-)

Note also that the contents of the site should be completely clear from the URL, so if you click it you can't say I didn't warn you.

http://godisimaginary.com

Highlights: #3, #5, #7, #19, #24, #28 (a classic), #30 (especially if you're female), #43.

Edit: This is pretty hilarious: http://www.jhuger.com/kisshank.php

Hey everybody, use this thing instead of Twitter: http://identi.ca

It has functioning IM, so unlike Twitter it is useful to me! (Also it is better because it is made of Open Sores.)

That is all. :-D

Apparently you can call the office of Gov. Schwarzenegger and express your support the recent pro-gay-marriage Supreme Court decision without even having to talk to a person. From a friend at work:

"""
To vote in support of the Supreme Court ' s decision on LGBT marriage:

1. call 1-916-445-2841
2. press 1, 5, 1, 1
"""

I just did that. I suggest you do it too!

The CMU KGB Puzzlehunt Spring 2008 - A Maze of Twisty Passages!

Registration

Facebook event

You should come! If you don't know who you'll team with yet, register yourself to help us get a headcount, then make sure to register your team before the event (or just show up and we'll set you up with one).

It will be glorious! :-)

You should all take a listen to NPR's Intelligence Squared, a (new?) debate program which I find quite interesting.

[I am currently reading Pierce, and] I'm starting to think much of the difficulty I have had with category theory is the fact that, between any given pair of objects, you can have a whole shitload of arrows, all different, all of which look the same in diagrams.

And similarly, from an object X to itself, you can have a whole mess of arrows, and only one of them is the identity arrow. But every one of them composes with an arrow from Y to X, giving an arrow from Y to X; it's just that the identity is the only one that gives you back the SAME arrow from Y to X as you gave it.

I think I'd like the diagrams better if they were color-coded, or something.

Just in case I still have a chance of influencing any Sooper Tooseday voters, I want to officially jump on the Elljay Obama bandwagon. Please, if you're still not sure who you're voting for, vote for Obama in the Democratic primary; and if you're voting for Hillary, think long and hard about your vote before you cast it.

Rather than post my reasoning in detail, I will instead suggest you search my friendspage for 'Obama', and read the many appeals that my various elljayfriends have made.

Here's one that's well-considered and well-written, and contains a link (first link) to the argument I forwarded to my mother, which also has both of those characteristics.


And a final appeal: If you're eligible to vote for Obama today and you were planning to stay home: PLEASE VOTE! This goes double if you are young, because we need to show the US political system that the young voters -- who generally stay home in droves, but this year are coming out in support of Obama -- matter, and they had better listen to us.

Stupid Facebook apps.

The "social profile" app tells me the following:

"1 people said it would date you. more..."

I can't tell if this is a real "people", or if they just make that up to get me to add their application (which I did.) I can't see any way to get it to tell me who... mind you it made me tell it who I would date before it would refuse to tell me that. :-P

So if you know how (or if it's you! ;-) ) feel free to let me in on the secret!

Fuckin' Facebook. :-P

I just fixed some subtle vandalism on the Wikipedia article Somniloquy. Way back in February, someone (with a user account, even!) swapped "REM" and "NREM" with no explanation, leaving NREM linking to the article on REM sleep. It disturbs me that nobody spotted it for 9+ months. (Possibly people have spotted it but been too unsure to fix it -- it's reasonably obvious that it was wrong if you know the difference between REM and NREM, but most people probably don't, and I didn't even notice the wrong link until after I went to make the edit.)

One thing this says to me is that there should be an easy way to view Wikipedia pages color-highlighted or something with what changes were submitted together, and let you mouseover to get edit summaries. The first thing I did when REM and NREM looked backwards, was go see whether they were swapped in an edit that did nothing else, without explanation (yep -- actually two separate edits).

I generally assume that if something 1) looks wrong to me, and 2) was changed from the thing that looks right to me to the way it is now, in the recent past, by an editor who did nothing else to the article, and left no explanation, then it's probably vandalism. I can balance (1) and (2) -- obviously the whole process starts with something that looks wrong to me, but the less I know about the subject, the more I rely on the fact that the vandalism stands out as anomalous in the edit history if I decide to revert it.

Usually I discover that the recent past is about 2 days -- this is the first time I've had to go back months to find the change. (On the other hand, it was still only a page of changes -- I generally won't search back further than that. So maybe, to account for article obscurity, we should model how long vandalism stays up as a function of the number of edits, rather than the passage of time, since it occurred. That does seem to make the most sense, and the idea that most vandalism doesn't last past a page of changes would be nice to know as far as the reliability of Wikipedia goes (versus the activity level of the article you're wondering about).)

It also seems like there should be a place where people can report apparent instances of subtle vandalism; but since the existence of such a page would undoubtedly be a catalyst for more subtle vandalism, possibly to the page itself, let me instead give a plea: If you see what you think is subtle vandalism, and you're not sure enough to fix it and/or you don't want to binary-search the history for evidence, let me know and I'll look at it. :-)

Hi all,

If you're in Pittsburgh, you should go register for A Maze of Twisty Passages, KGB's puzzle hunt. It's taking place on Saturday from 1 PM into the late evening (wrap-up meeting shooting for 8PM.) Teams are up to 4 -- you can register with a team, or we can put you on one if you prefer.

More information
Register!

If you aren't in Pittsburgh, read about our glorious puzzlehunt, and be sad that you won't be here. ;-)