the terrible awful no good very bad book
Are you missing some adjectives? They might be in this derisively mocking 2013 review of fictional novel Inferno by renowned and unjustly ridiculed author Dan Brown.
warning
By Jenny Joseph, 1961:
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me,
And I shall spend my pension
on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals,
and say we've no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired,
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells,
And run my stick along the public railings,
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people's gardens,
And learn to spit.
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat,
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go,
Or only bread and pickle for a week,
And hoard pens and pencils and beer mats
and things in boxes.
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry,
And pay our rent and not swear in the street,
And set a good example for the children.
We will have friends to dinner and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me
are not too shocked and surprised,
When suddenly I am old
and start to wear purple!
a fireball of a well-crafted sentence
I'm trying to decide which turn of phrase I like better here: the terrifically informative
the boiling temperature of paraffin wax is hotter than its autoignition temperature
or the low-hanging fruit that is
Don't try this at home! Do it at your friend's house first.
i must live long enough
(source)
a time to repeat
Consider the following decimal expansions:
$$\begin{aligned} \textstyle \frac{1}{ 1 } &= 1.0 & \textstyle \frac{1}{ 11 } &= 0.[09] & % 0.09090909090909091 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 21 } &= 0.[04761\,9] \\ % 0.047619047619047616 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 2 } &= 0.5 & \textstyle \frac{1}{ 12 } &= 0.08[3] & % 0.08333333333333333 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 22 } &= 0.0[45] \\ % 0.045454545454545456 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 3 } &= 0.[3] & % 0.3333333333333333 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 13 } &= 0.[07692\,3] & % 0.07692307692307693 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 23 } &= 0.[04347\,82608\,69565\,21739\,13] \\ % 0.043478260869565216 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 4 } &= 0.25 & \textstyle \frac{1}{ 14 } &= 0.0[71428\,5] & % 0.07142857142857142 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 24 } &= 0.041[6] \\ % 0.041666666666666664 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 5 } &= 0.2 & \textstyle \frac{1}{ 15 } &= 0.0[6] & % 0.06666666666666667 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 25 } &= 0.04 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 6 } &= 0.1[6] & % 0.16666666666666666 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 16 } &= 0.0625 & \textstyle \frac{1}{ 26 } &= 0.0[38461\,5] \\ % 0.038461538461538464 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 7 } &= 0.[14285\,7] & % 0.14285714285714285 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 17 } &= 0.[05882\,35294\,11764\,7] & % 0.058823529411764705 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 27 } &= 0.[037] \\ % 0.037037037037037035 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 8 } &= 0.125 & \textstyle \frac{1}{ 18 } &= 0.0[5] & % 0.05555555555555555 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 28 } &= 0.035[71428\,5] \\ % 0.03571428571428571 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 9 } &= 0.[1] & % 0.1111111111111111 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 19 } &= 0.[05263\,15789\,47368\,421] & % 0.05263157894736842 \\ \textstyle \frac{1}{ 29 } &= 0.[03448\,27586\,20689\,65517\,24137\,931] \\ % 0.034482758620689655 \\ % \textstyle \frac{1}{ 10 } &= 0.1 & \textstyle \frac{1}{ 20 } &= 0.05 & \textstyle \frac{1}{ 30 } &= 0.0[3] \\ % 0.03333333333333333 \\ \end{aligned}$$
Each of these either terminates, like $\frac18 = 0.125$, or repeats, like $\frac{1}{27} = 0.[037]$. What determines the length of these repeating sequences?
positing variable precision
From this year's "summer of math exposition" collection , an explainer on the posit, a variable-precision representation of floating-point numbers.
The posit uses fewer bits to encode small exponents, so numbers whose magnitude is roughly unity can get a few extra bits of precision in the mantissa.
The intuition that most floating-point values have magnitude roughly unity is certainly consistent with my experience, and also consistent with guidance that I have received from various computing mentors. But it would be interesting to build a virtual CPU and monitor which values enter the FPU during normal operation, to check.
aligning before versus after
This excellent visualization of vaccine effectiveness made the rounds over the past few days:
all linguists are liars
This book looks like a lot of fun. An excerpt (emphasis added):
"Etymology for its own sake is of little importance, even if it has curiosity value … the chief difficulty is that there can be no 'true' or 'original' meaning since human language stretches back too far." We have to agree with the latter — but the former seems absurd.
It's worth asking at this point why etymology is so seductive. For most people it represents their first (and frequently only) encounter with linguistics. As we know, words are at once completely prosaic — we use them every day, mostly without thinking — and rather mysterious. As a result it's natural to ask where they come from. We weave stories around their origin, both patently false ("lol" and "golf") and more plausible ("decimate" and "educate"). That curiosity shouldn't be dismissed: it's a knocking at the door of linguistics. If they shut it in people's faces, the guardians of knowledge about language risk closing off a route to both enlightenment and wonder. As a result, people seek their wonder elsewhere — in false accounts of how language works.
In any case, it isn't right to see etymology as some poor relation to "proper" linguistics. An attempt to explain why the meanings of words change is an attempt to explain how the mind works, how language works, and how society works. Perhaps this is why it has been deemed out of bounds.
the fastest bird in the west
Here's a delightful little story about the SR-71 Blackbird, attributed to Major Brian Shul, USAF (Retired), that I'm going to duplicate here so that it's less likely disappear from the internet.
You can listen to Shul tell the story in a Youtube video, if that floats your boat (or flies your plane, I suppose). Doing both is amusing because the reported speed seems to have gotten larger as Shul has retold it. All good stories grow in retelling.
There were a lot of things we couldn't do in an SR-71, but we were the fastest guys on the block and loved reminding our fellow aviators of this fact. People often asked us if, because of this fact, it was fun to fly the jet. Fun would not be the first word I would use to describe flying this plane. Intense, maybe. Even cerebral. But there was one day in our Sled experience when we would have to say that it was pure fun to be the fastest guys out there, at least for a moment.
the funnels in my kitchen are also nested
I wrote a while ago about tornados with nested funnels, but a few days ago I found this lovely example on Bluesky.
why the big paws
I haven't been putting stuff here on this website, but I should change that.
the river stuck out over the Gulf like a fishing-rod
On the dangers of naïve extrapolation. From Mark Twain’s “Life On The Mississippi,” 1883, via Project Gutenberg.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
it's only fitting
Here's a quick-n-dirty Gaussian curve fitter, which I seem to reinvent about twice a year. There are a number of canned solutions that I can never remember how to use, but I also frequently find myself wanting to fit weird functions.
Below in a minimum working example. But the short-short version is
def func(x, *params): ... x,y = read_some_data() guess_params = [...] from scipy import optimize better_params, covariance = optimize.curve_fit( func, x, y, p0=guess_params)
fractal time and time again
In the Mandelbrot set — that is, the complex numbers $c$ for which the recurrence
$$\begin{aligned} z_{n+1} = z_n^2 + c \end{aligned}$$
remains finite — there are different regions of recurrence. Here's the classic picture. Let's play a bit.
there were microtonal bells
I am interested in hearing from perfect-pitchers and ethnomusicologists about this delightful physics-of-music video.
I'm particularly interested in an aside observation that the "least dissonant" major third based on this overtone analysis is a little flat relative to the equal-temperament major third. In choral singing, the conductor is always complaining that the major third needs to tune a bit higher.
division and conquest
Suppose I have some random process described by a binomial distribution, with "success" probability $p$. For $n$ trials, the expected number of "successes" obeys
$$\begin{aligned} P(k) &= {n\choose k} p^k (1-p)^{n-k} \end{aligned}$$
Now suppose I do a bunch of different sets of trials, such as practice exams of varying lengths. I want to model each practice exam as being drawn from a distribution of the appropriate size with the same probability. What's the right way to combine them?
the html quine
It doesn't matter whether you "view source" or not. Although on my current browser, "view source" uses different rules for word-wrapping.
but soft, yonder princess
The other day I was
playing with tmux
and learned that I can drive stuff in remote windows.
But for doing this programmatically, the right tool is
Python, as usual.
Specifically, the tmuxp library,
which includes an interactive shell and a parser for readable config-files.
nary a pip remains
As much as I'm trying to have good hygiene, I occasionally install some unintended cruft in my "empty" python environments. A magic incantation to reset everything seems to be
pip freeze | xargs pip uninstall -y
eerily similar
Compare the openings of these two pieces of music:
Both start with an E-flat descending guitar scale, 3-3-2 rhythm, lots of sol-mi-sol in the vocal.
revenge of the kludge
I'm playing with termux-api,
which exposes a bunch of Android API things to the
termux command-line
environment. I'm kind of afraid that I'm going to hack together an
app using the command line. Excellent and hilarious and a terrible
idea. The kind of procrastination that looks like work.
clipping chrome
In the spirit of the clipboard, the tool for
the clipboard on Chrome is wl-copy, from the package wl-clipboard.
On MacOs and perhaps some Linuxes, it may be save-buffer.
your princess is in another window
I've been playing with tmux
for making it possible to do more things from one terminal window.
Today I realized that you can type tmux commands in one shell, and
affect the contents of other windows. You can send keypresses.
I knew from the interactive help (C-b ?) that you can send a pane
within a window to a new window, but you can also capture panes from
one window in another. The command language is the same that you can
type at the C-b : command prompt; you can put them in a file and
process (from anywhere) with tmux source.
But the cuteness for now is that I can do
make continuous 2>&1 | tmux splitw -dI & make serve 2>&1 | tmux splitw -dI &
and have two long-running processes putting their outputs into one window, while I can control them from another.
apps from the shell
The incantation that I was looking for to start an Android app from within the shell is
am start --user 0 -n net.gsantner.markor/net.gsantner.markor.activity.MainActivity
The problem is identifying the name at the back.