Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

Fucking To The Stars. Why shoot each other with electromagnetic lasers when you can use gravity instead?

 

Having spent the past several weeks listening to this piece at 105 BPM, hearing it at its original tempo of 190 BPM now sounds wrong. Not just too fast, but wrong.

 

On an intellectual level, I know that my dad has been doing computer programming for longer than I've been alive. On an emotional level, I've just had to remind him that error messages are rarely informative about what's actually going wrong.

 

There are certain angles from which a car running its windshield wipers looks just like a lizard licking its own eyeball.

 

For some reason I have this impression that cake should be eaten off of paper plates. The forks can be made of metal, but the plates should be paper.

 

Cake on a paper plate is automatically more delicious and fun.

 

I'm still not over having written "1 + 1 = 2?" on the board in the math department lounge and meaning it.

 

I kind of want to get into why I meant it, because in the context of the rest of what I was saying at the time it was a nontrivial question, but it's also really funny in hindsight, especially since there were people there in the lounge who hadn't been listening to me and so whose only context for it was that I was a fifth year grad student whom they normally respected.

[EDIT] Of course I forgot that I actually did write about this incident over in the math thread.

 

Returning to the theme of magic as cryptography, the reason that hair and nails and especially blood can be used to affect the people who shed them is that they allow for sidechannel attacks. Maybe not enough for full True Name recovery, no, but enough for forgery against certain systems.

 

"Mufasa has fallen! I, Scarstream, now lead the Pride Lands!"

 

The kind of person who would insist on referring to canapés as "sofas".

 

I was going to make a joke about set theory and the Bag of Holding spell, but it turns out that Bags of Holding are proper classes.

 

I almost want to write a play simply so that I can include the line "All's well actually that ends well actually" and to have the program's first page be titled "Melodramatis Personae"

 

Quantum algorithms are all like "as long as it takes fewer than exponentially many attempts to make it work, we'll consider that a success." Except for those quantum algorithms that are like "as long as it takes fewer than doubly exponentially many attempts to make it work, we'll consider that a success."

 

Continuing with my quest to get a full board in 2048, it occurs to me that to get the 131072 tile requires getting to 2048 64 times. Sort-of. The trick is of course that the difficulty of getting each 2048 is not equal. But nor does it seem to be monotonically increasing. The interesting thing is that, by having some large tiles on the board in the appropriate places, they block various other tiles from moving and also block possible spawn points. So there are some times when getting to 2048 feels fairly easy if only because the relevant tiles are railroaded into being in the right places. There are, of course, times when it feels harder because you don't have enough room to maneuver around unfortunate spawns (which is why this entire endeavor would be nigh-impossible without the 1-undo option).
And of course, regardless of how well I play, there will eventually come a time when getting another 2048 will be outright impossible, and I predict that the 2048 right before that will actually not feel too bad, again because of the railroading. Well, should I ever get there.

 

While the obvious answer is that I only saw her during the school year, i.e. during the winter, when it was cold, my high school self found it very symbolic that whenever we wandered by my house together the roses in the garden were dead.

I mean, I hated that bush, even more than I hated the rest of the garden, although maybe not as much as I hated the apple trees, but still, it was symbolic.

 

I don't have enough math knowledge to know what this means, but I'd be fascinated to find out. If you happen to feel like explaining the joke, you've got an audience. :D

 

A set is a bunch of things. About a century ago, mathematicians, wanting to make everything as simple as possible, said "what if we just said that everything was a set. A set of what? Other sets." And then the idea would have been to build all of mathematics from sets that are contained inside other sets and which contain yet more sets. Nested sets all the way down, and all the way up.
And then we quickly realized that this caused a lot of paradoxes, contradictions that followed from what seemed like reasonable things to say about sets that contained other sets.

So the original joke would have been something about putting a Bag of Holding into another Bag of Holding, and trying to recreate some of the problems that plagued early set-theory via these nested Bags of Holding.


To get around the paradoxes of sets, mathematicians came up with the idea of "classes", and said that all sets are classes, but there are some classes that are not sets; such classes are called "proper classes". The trade-off is that while every set is contained in some class, proper classes aren't allowed to be contained in anything. In particular, you can't stick a proper class into another proper class; proper classes are "too big" to be contained, for some notions of "big" that are actually kind of complicated. While this resolved a lot of the paradoxes, it also left us with the issue of "what are classes?", an issue which most mathematicians choose to ignore.

Going back to Bags of Holding, it turns out that the creators of DnD, at least as of 5th edition, realized that allowing nested Bags of Holding was a Bad Idea, and so decreed that if you try to put a Bag of Holding into another Bag of Holding, both bags self-destruct and you open a gate to the Astral Plane. I'm sure that this mechanism has been used for all sorts of shenanigans in many a campaign.

Anyway, the meta-joke is that, just as you can't stick a proper class into another class, you can't stick a Bag of Holding into another Bag of Holding. The developers probably weren't thinking about preventing set-theoretical paradoxes when they decided that you weren't supposed to stick a Bag of Holding into another Bag of Holding, but who knows.

 

And like everyone else, I've been sucked into Bret Devereaux's analyses of the historical inaccuracies in popular culture.

 

Do hardcore gamers send each other "Git Gud Soon" cards?