An Algorithmic Lucidity

Of course, the traditional beverage of Newtonmas is bleggnog.

If you shouldn't make lemonade, then life hasn't given you lemons.

ur gr(8+ε) for arbitrary ε > 0

I think there needs to be a movie about a woman who has two jobs: artificial general intelligence programmer by day, prostitute by night. I say this mostly because I have a great idea for the tagline to go on the posters: "The oldest profession ... and the last."

"Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?"

"The same thing we do every night, Pinky—the Right Thing to Do Given Current Info and Preferences!"

I'm skeptical; I think it's actually just a really big torus.

In the future (to say nothing of large swathes of the present), creative people work for status and attention rather than money. When X is employed by Y, X is said to be "on Y's blogroll" (coined in analogy to payroll).

It sounds like a kind of dog bred to harvest Cucurbitaceae-family fruits.

In addition to — and –, there should also be an &rdash; HTML character entity reference which specifies the Unicode high voltage sign U+26A1 (⚡).

I bought cookie dough, on the thought that maybe I should bake cookies and offer them to people at the University; if they were to ask what the occasion was, I could say, "It seemed like a whimsical thing to do, and I'm a whimsical person." But I'm not sure I'll actually do it.

I used to work for a different store in this chain, the one on Ygnacio Valley. The stores are numbered (internally; the numbers aren't secret, but it's the sort of thing you don't notice unless you work for the company), and the store on Ygnacio Valley is number 1701, which I remember thinking was a very significant number, but I don't remember anyone else agreeing with me, probably because if I told anyone, then they hadn't been a Star Trek fan.

Judging by the comment moderation queue, this blog is wildly popular among a certain niche audience.

Namely, spambots. Although I can't help but wonder why spammers are so incompetent. Of course spammers have no reason to put any effort into the marginal comment or email. The reason spam exists is precisely because in a magical land of near-zero marginal cost (like the internet), the unscrupulous can afford to send sales pitches to a million people even if only fifteen bite. But that doesn't mean spammers couldn't put a little fixed-cost effort into improving their algorithm for generating those millions of spams. At least conventional advertising is occasionally entertaining; in contrast, most of the spam I see is just noise, to the extent that it once gave me an idea (which I would not implement; it's not my style) for a Reddit novelty account: "CompetentSpammer" would write eloquent, insightful comments that ever-so-subtly worked in references to charm bracelets and sketchy pharmaceuticals.

I know, it sounds as if I'm complaining, but I'm not: we are all grateful that spam is so easily distinguished from actual content; I was only wondering.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, some commentary on spam comments submitted to this blog is below the break—

Would-be commenter "charms" writes on "Summing the Multinomial Coefficients":

I adore thomas family funeral home! I got my initial couple as soon as i was initially 10 yrs old, the sunlight yellow quite short old classic.Now i'm 15 yrs old nowadays and also, since after that, I have got as well received your ebony quite short old classic, your bleak quite short old classic, [...]

And it goes on like that for another ninety words. One wonders: is anyone really going to buy shoes or whatever based on a blog comment like that? Maybe, maybe fifteen out of a million ... which I guess was the point. But again, one imagines that there would be a payoff to spammers for being more discriminating—I guess some them are. I got a few attempted comments referring to Zack Snyder, so someone's at least paying attention to the URL.

I even got one attempted comment that sort-of looks on topic, maybe, if you don't look too closely? "Alexey" writes on "Interpolating Between Vectorized Green's Theorems":

Great! I see how to finish it off now, and I see why given the dftierenfial equation and being told to look at F and f you would see that relation, but just introducing F in the first place well, I guess I just have to accept this proof is awesome. =DYou asked for topic areas: Have you ever seen Euler's proof that the number of partitions of a number into odd numbers equals that of a number into distinct numbers? That is a good one. Other than that, some Galois theory would be nice?

The comment throws around a lot of math terminology, but if it has any non-coincidental relationship to my post, I don't see it. And the URL supplied just goes to a near-empty Facebook profile. What's even the motive here? Maybe I'm wrong to think of this as "spam", when it could be a genuine math enthusiast who's confused, or bad at commmunicating in English? Who can say but that, in the end, what we really hate are low-quality comments, and we don't care whether or not they're trying to sell us something? (See also xkcd #810.)

I think I like the store-brand "sparkling water beverages"; they fill a similar niche as soda (which I never buy at the store, but have been known to occasionally consume at parties or restaurants), but seem like they ought to be less deadly.

I think the "More grains. Less you!" slogan on this box of cereal sounds sinister. I mean, they're probably just talking about weight loss, but still ...

I'm suspicious of processed food products shaped like cartoon characters, as if there are highly-placed cannibals at General Mills plotting to train children that it's okay to eat creatures that can talk. On the other hoof, these fruit-flavored snacks are delicious.

Did you know that boats are useful for moving things over the water??

She's a dilettante; you're a dabbler; I'm executing a breadth-first search.

I've been taking a summer course at a university which I won't name, because whenever I do, I'm always tempted to replace one of the words with an obscenity that starts with the same letter, which is probably a bad habit. The topic is contemporary sexuality, which seemed like a fine choice for knocking out one of my remaining so-called "general education" requirements, and maybe even learning something relevant to my interests.

The class ends on Thursday the ninth, and I had intended to make a lot of progress today (the sixth) filling out the workbook (worth half a letter grade) due then. I didn't get very far. The task shouldn't be difficult; my goal is only to reduce the probability of my receiving a C in the class by means of circling the appropriate letters for the multiple-choice prompts (for which the answers are conveniently provided) and scribbling responses to the short-answer questions, glancing at the reading as necessary. There was once a time when I would have regarded this behavior as sinful: of course what you're supposed to do is carefully do the corresponding reading by the assigned date before thoughtfully filling out each workbook section, only using the multiple-choice answers to check your work. But if I've abandoned my moral scruples sometime in the past five years, then I also throw far fewer crying fits, and I don't think these changes are unrelated.

But when you don't respect the work, even doing a lazy job takes a certain amount of self-command. One of the workbook questions asks, "How do you define 'virginity' and what behaviors do you believe cause one to 'lose' his or her virginity?" I wrote, "It's pointless to argue about the definitions of words; once you know what behavior someone has engaged in, then calling it 'virginity' or 'non-virginity' doesn't give you more information". Snarky passive-aggression? Maybe, but when you ask a retarded question, what do you expect?

My patience broke when I got to the article arguing that we shouldn't use baseball metaphors to talk about sex (because those are sexist and oppositional) but should instead use pizza metaphors. Except it doesn't say metaphors, it says conceptual models.

In the evening, I received an email from the University. "Be prepared for Graduate School" says the subject line, although I don't understand the motivation for capitalizing Graduate School but not prepared. Morally, I expect such an email to say something like, "Make sure you've chosen a valuable or exciting topic on which to advance the frontiers of human knowledge, as is the function and sacred duty of scholars!" But of course it's just telling me that "[t]test preparation workshops for the GRE, GMAT, LSAT, CBEST, and RICA are starting soon."

This one is a classic that I love to repeat; stop me if you've heard it before. Knock, knock.

"Who's there?"

Truly repentant are those.

"Truly repentant are those who?"

Truly repentant are those who, when the temptation to sin is repeated, refrain from sinning!

"I just got an idea that will make a great blog post ..."

"No, it won't."

"What? I didn't even tell you the idea."

"I'm not denying that you had an idea; rather, I claim that it won't make a great blog post, because you won't write it. You wrote two nontrivial posts last year and then abandoned your blog for six months. Obviously, you're just like all the other millions of bags of human refuse who think of themselves as writers and yet never write. They never change, and you've shown by your behavior that you're one of them, so why should I believe you when you say you're going to write something?"

"Uh ..."

"Aww, are you offended? Is our little soi-disant 'aspiring rationalist' incapable of handling a honest statement of the undeniable truth?"

"No, I'm not offended. I disagree—"

"As expected."

"—but I won't argue with you. Just—stay subscribed to the RSS feed, will you?"

"Oh, but of course. It's not like anything will appear in it."

"..."

"This is the part where you threaten to drown me in a veritable deluge of good writing, and then I continue to mock the pathetic cycle of failure and self-delusion at the center of your existence."

"Let's skip that part. I'll see you later."

"I know what you're trying to do! It won't work!"

"I never said it would work."

Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and days of auld lang syne? (Hint: Assume the opposite and try to derive a contradiction.)