Predominantly Erroneous (Exohedron nonsense blog)

I have very high rhythmic standards in terms of synchronization, which is probably why I'm so drawn to electronic music where the timing can be controlled so precisely by the producer, and in particular drawn to genres where everything is quantized. I also have trouble appreciating videos of people moving as a group if they aren't precisely synchronized with one another, which means that groups of dancers and military parades and such are generally just irritating to watch. If any one of you is more than a sixteenth of a beat off from anyone else, forget it.

 

Every once in a while I think "Hey, I've got this conlang floating around the sci-fi story, I can use it to generate Meaningful Names!" Except then I remember that the conlang doesn't actually have a phonology. I know that there are sixteen consonants and sixteen vowels, and that half of each are unvoiced and the other voiced, and that the language uses a CV syllabary so that every syllable is exactly one byte of information (ignoring actual entropy because I haven't done anything resembling frequency counts), but I don't actually have a solid grasp on what those consonants and vowels are, and hence I don't have a lexicon from which I can construct names.
I could try to go backwards, starting with the names I have and trying to build lexical items out of them, but the characters I have all are supposed to be using different bastardizations of the conlang so I would have to figure out how the sound-changes work.

 

There are colors we can't see, and some of those colors can poison you.

 

When you've seen enough tokusatsu that you already know that the gag is that they're going to explode upon contact but you still laugh anyway, because you don't watch tokusatsu for the sophisticated comedy.

 

But how would things have changed if the original depiction of the Immaculate Conception was as a three-way including Joseph, rather than just Mary and God? God not necessarily as "father" but as some other entity who nonetheless shares some essence with the conceived child. If the 'Immaculate' part of the conception is not the absence of the husband but the absence of sin, then Joseph's participation wouldn't change that, would it? Or was Joseph too impure?

This would also explain the whole "leave room for Jesus" thing; he's just under the impression that that's how these things work.

 

Deliberately mixing up "semiotic" and "semi-automatic"

 

Like a record player but the arm and needle have been replaced with a toothbrush.

 

Chesterton's Gatekeeping

 

The Count of Monte Carlo

 

Like a vampire, except instead of not showing up in mirrors they show up but with a different color palette.

 

I have one colleague who likes to stop by my desk in the morning to find out about the day's logistics disasters, since I tend to get in before her and we got put in charge of handling said disasters a few months ago. Also to ask me to rubber duck and occasionally correct her linear algebra.
For reasons I don't quite understand, my standard greeting to her has morphed into "hewwo". Not really cutesy or anything in terms of intonation, just a regular "hello" except with "w"s. It's mostly out of laziness, I think; "l" takes slightly more effort to pronounce than "w".
If she ever comments on it, I'll tell her it's the remnants of my Boston accent.

 

infinite minesweeper

 

Almost certainly not the first person to think of this, but if I ever do get a cat I'm going to name them "the poltergeist" so that I can tell people that the poltergeist spent all night knocking things off my shelves.

 

The sysadmins upgraded the Linux version at work and the color balance is ever so slightly different from what it was last week. I ended up completely changing the palette on my end so that the disparity wouldn't be so distracting.

 

I can't remember how long it's been since the last time I had to teach myself yet another variant of the Fourier transform, but, uh, guess who has to learn about yet another variant of the Fourier transform?
And it's not like these are exactly new ideas at the bottom, not at all, but which details are important keep changing.

 

So how straight do you have to be in order for it to be unproblematic to watch brojob porn?

 

I know it marks me as a Certain Kind of mathematician, but the fact that most introductions to homotopy don't automatically include the basics of groupoids is a little baffling to me. The reason that π₀ is a set and not a group is because 0-groupoids are sets, not groups. π₁ is a group for connected spaces because connected groupoids are equivalent to groups. π₂ is a group because it's actually a 2-groupoid, you're just ignoring everything below level 2. And so on.
Would I have become an algebraic topologist or a homotopy theorist if this were how homotopy theory was first presented to me? Probably not. But still.

 

When I was in grad school a bunch of the math grad students liked to play a fairly ridiculous version of Fluxx. To start with, we had amongst us like five or six different flavors of the game, and we'd mix them all together; since the card backs are all identical, it's impossible to tell which version of the game the next card is going to come from. This means we had like three hundred cards in circulation, including some duplicates.
The other major change was to the basic rules: instead of the default being draw 1, play 1, we set it to draw 5, play 1, hand limit 0. Yes, it was fucking awful until someone managed to play a new rule card, but it did mean that we went through cards super fast, which was helpful given that there were hundreds of cards to go through.
It was a real mess of a game and it was even more impossible to do anything deliberately than it is in normal Fluxx and I loved it. Unsurprisingly, I have not since found a new group of people willing to play this shitshow with me.

 

RIP Daft Punk

[Note: The two individuals who comprised Daft Punk are not dead, they've just decided to stop being Daft Punk]

 

When you're reading a paper and realize that not only is part of it copied verbatim from another paper by a subset of the authors, the underlying TeX is almost certainly copied verbatim from that other paper, and unfortunately they forgot to change the variable names consistently.
I'm guessing that if I dug around through the references I'll find the other three papers that this paper is built from, because this is clearly just four papers frankensteined together with very little thought as to how it actually reads as a whole. I was wondering why there were like twelve authors; now it makes sense.