Ray Bradbury said, ""

Geekery For Hire

The Isiah has asked me to impersonate him for an upcoming event, a piece of mandatory volunteerism some Carter-loving scoundrel in UB dreamed up.

I'll have to convince others that I am a senior electrical engineering student, so I'm going to write an Isiahbot to create cribsheets. All I need is a proper mixture of cynicism and chip architecture.

My best unaided effort: "if I wire this lightswitch incorrectly a complex phase differential will oscillate throughout the higher Fourier harmonics and produce an inductive positive feedback effect travelling through the length of the node at a rate proportional to the natural log of the square of the signal velocity of the wavefront, possibly producing an amplitude modulation within the zeroth harmonic capable of dissipating into thermal energy. Since everything of importance is done by guys simply trying to get laid, and since I won't get laid for producing a fire risk, I won't allow it. Screw that Faustian crap. You do it."

Here's hoping I don't ruin his reputation over the course of a couple hours.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 30, 2007 21:24 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, geekery

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Elements of AI

This morning I found what may be the coolest Lisp site: Elements of AI at the University of Washington.

I've been literally salivating over some of those programs. Look at their Prover program and tell me it doesn't arouse you.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 30, 2007 09:36 EST | Permalink | comments |
discoveries, geekery

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Every Time I Program in Lisp

I wonder how the hell McCarthy, Minsky, and the MIT guys got anything done in it. The play factor is too high. Asking a man to program a given task in it is like asking a man to take the Batmobile out to get the laundry; you know in five minutes he'll be going across the state line at 200 m.p.h.

I have been ostensibly working on an inference engine all day. And yet I have nothing to show for it except pointless diversions to which, if questioned, I can only respond, "you just don't get it, do you?"

Well, at least I'm not laughing maniacally and shouting "mad! You all thought I was mad!"

Yet.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 29, 2007 22:22 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
geekery

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In Which I Poetically Lisp

(Programming (Lisp) is
    (like (seducing a (beautiful woman))
    (in a house 
         (that is burning down))
    (while 
         (avoiding 
              (waking up the (sleeping bear))
     )
) 

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 29, 2007 18:49 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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Not Cool on Many Levels

I just got back from grocery shopping.

While I was waiting to place my items on the conveyor belt, a well-dressed African man and his son in front of me, both sporting interesting ritualistic facial scars, started picking through my cart and taking things. A bag of mangoes. A jar of mustard. A pack of sponges. A bottle of dishwasher fluid. Even a spaghetti strainer.

I was speechless until the clerk actually started ringing up my items for him. Then I made a feeble stammering sound much like an irate kitten. Luckily the woman behind me quipped, "if only people would pay for my stuff, too!" loudly enough for the clerk to hear.

The clerk noticed what Scarface and Son were doing and cleared the register. The father made a surprised, "why the hell did you tell me to do that?!" look at his son, yelled something in another language, and bitchslapped the boy across the face.

I assume that the boy misled his father about American customs. I also assume the father is a frickin' retard to have believed a 10 year old. Furthermore, I assume from the freshness of the boy's ritual scars and the fact that he was wearing some kind of anime shirt, that their household drama will rival anything on TV. All immigrants face the burden of assimilating into American culture, but having a visible trace of the Paleolithic carved into your forehead has got to make that much harder.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 29, 2007 13:47 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, life

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Heh

In his Lecture on the Automatic Computing Engine, Turing said

The [programmers] are liable to get replaced because as soon as any technique becomes at all stereotyped it becomes possible to devise a system of instruction tables which will enable the electronic computer to do it for itself. It may happen however that the [programmers] will refuse to do this. They may be unwilling to let their jobs be stolen from them in this way. In that case they would surround the whole of their work with mystery and make excuses, couched in well chosen gibberish...

There you have it, folks. In the age of the dinosaurs, Turing had already predicted Fortran, Cobol, Java, and Microsoft programmers.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 29, 2007 10:45 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, geekery

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Cancel That, I Found Something Amazing

The Zebra Puzzle, variously claimed to be created by either Einstein or Lewis Carroll:

• There are five houses.
• The Englishman lives in the red house.
• The Spaniard owns the dog.
• Coffee is drunk in the green house.
• The Ukrainian drinks tea.
• The green house is immediately to the right of the ivory house.
• The Old Gold smoker owns snails.
• Kools are smoked in the yellow house.
• Milk is drunk in the middle house.
• The Norwegian lives in the first house.
• The man who smokes Chesterfields lives in the house next to the man with the fox.
• Kools are smoked in the house next to the house where the horse is kept.
• The Lucky Strike smoker drinks orange juice.
• The Japanese smokes Parliaments.
• The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.

Now, who drinks water? Who owns the zebra?

The solution is, of course, online, but that's not very fun. After I solve it I'm going to work on an inference engine in LISP. How could I not?!

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 28, 2007 17:24 EST | Permalink | comments (5) |
geekery

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What to do...

I've got to choose whether to spend all night:

programming a Python or Scilab (whichever is more interesting) program that allows me to play around with wave mechanics,

programming a C++ simulation of a neural network based on Turing's B-Type Machine description,

working on a personal assistant bot in perl that can do things like prioritize my projects in interest and urgency, remind me of bills, check my email, and engage in Socratic dialogue,

translating Gibberbot and Hemingbot into LISP,

or wandering between all of these, tiring, and then eventually merging them into one horrifyingly schizophrenic program.

What's that you say? A life? I never heard of it.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 28, 2007 16:54 EST | Permalink | comments |
life, geekery

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This Is How I Want To Spend My Midlife Crisis

Look at these guys. You just know they've got teenagers that are bugging the crap out of them and jobs that are giving them ulcers, but for a brief reverberated second there is nothing but the thrill of surf. Screw fancy cars, siliconized mistresses, or tiger hunting. This is how men should cope with male menapause.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 28, 2007 03:37 EST | Permalink | comments |
music

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More ________!

Am I the only one who has noticed a resurgence of the "More Cowbell" meme lately?

Over the generations, this will acquire a Zen-like pith. It is said that a student asked Colonel Angus, "Do dictators control their citizens, or do the citizens allow dictators to control them?" Colonel Angus cut off his own left hand and yelled, "More cowbell!"

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 27, 2007 18:36 EST | Permalink | comments |
memery

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Cognitive Dissonance

Scott Adams loves to write about cognitive dissonance. I am more interested in the mathematical aspect than the humorous aspect.

Godel and Turing proved that any mathematical/algorithmic process that aspires to consistency, must contain within itself propositions that are true but undecidable/uncomputable. In mathematics, all formalisms must be consistent, for the slightest inconsistency renders the entire formalism absolutely useless. As Bertrand Russell famously remarked, "given 1+1=3, I can prove that I am the Pope." The same goes for mechanical processes: imagine a programming language that allowed one to assign two separate values simultaneously to a scalar variable. So, mathematicians and computer scientists are stuck with the catch-22 that for their techniques to remain "sane," they are forced to accept certain restrictions on what those processes may yield.

Now, look at the human mind on a neural level. Each neuron mechanically performs an additive operation, completely determined by a rather simple partial differential equation describing the electrical potential across the cellular membrane in terms of chemical diffusion. At the neural level, basically, there is only AND and NOT; it is almost perfectly consistent but for rare instances of cellular-level brain damage. At this level, as with the transister level of a computer, there is no room for contradiction.

Now zoom out to the "software" level of the human brain. Suddenly we find people capable of the grossest logical fallacies and contradictions (We call them liberals). Somehow, between the strict consistent formalism of the neuron and the flow of mental symbols, inconsistency has entered the picture. It is obvious that thoughts, while themselves the operations of a consistent "formalism," are anything but a consistent system. As the 60's showed us, the human mind is capable of thinking literally any thought, no matter how self-contradictory.

The human mind is therefore a complete formalism. Given infinite time, a person could conclude every single proposition and its negation from the same set of premises. Meanwhile, the human brain is constrained by its very consistency to be omega-incomplete. We have the curious result that an unconstrained system develops out of a restrained system.

An analogous thing occurs in hydrodynamics. The interactions between each molecule in a stream of wind or water are perfectly described by linear relationships, yet on a larger scale non-linearity produces the chaotic patterns of turbulence. What is the analogous mechanism for thought? Does a "Law of Large Numbers of Neurons" kick in to produce non-linear relationships and patterns? Can the inevitable presence of some imperfect neurons cause a non-linear cascade of cognitive errors resulting in the French? Or is there even, as Roger Penrose thinks, a butterfly effect stemming directly from quantum-mechanical fluctuations which eventually make themselves felt on the macroscopic level?

Suppose I overexaggerated the contradictory aspect of thought. Would we then have thoughts incapable of being thought? Would this be the reason why conspiracy theorists and the insane in general are unable to conceive that they are delusional? Would I stop asking these questions?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 27, 2007 16:21 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
philosophy, geekery

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In Which I Justify A Joke About a Pudgy Dog

Say what you will, but I'd have to be a hobbitish Iranian dictator not to have responded to a joke about a small and somewhat edgy Westie.

I must make a note of this. Women will very quickly discover my weakness for small, plump dogs, and use it to good advantage where cleavage and flirting would go have gone unnoticed by me.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 27, 2007 15:21 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
humor, introspection

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Oh Dear...

I just discovered that Fairieobsession made me a friend.

And then I looked at the poor thing's blog. Oh my.

If you are reading this, for the love of G-d, don't be afraid to ask someone for help. I'm sure some friendly Motimer will gladly show you how to build a template.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 26, 2007 21:26 EST | Permalink | comments (4) |
blogging, discoveries

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Spam Surge

I've been getting an average of two comment spams a minute for the past three hours, and had about 120 waiting for me when I got home from work.

Not amusingly bizarre spam, either, with an awful lot of those "untitled" blank spams.

I have three options. Most of this traffic focuses on the same three or four old posts; if I plow through my posts I might be able to find them and switch off comments. Too bad Motime doesn't have a search field for post titles within the appropriate window. Or, I could restrict comments to Mo'timers only, even though that practically guarantees no one else will comment. Or, I could take a vacation and personally introduce some of these spammers to iron knuckles and battery acid.

Actually, I have a fourth option. I'm working on a perlbot capable of logging into my account through the text-based Linx browser, doing a simple search for words like "excellent", "teensex", "guestbook", etc, logging the IP addresses of offenders into a nifty log file for my SpamAssassin bot (so far, it can murder-ping and strangle-wget, and I'm trying to add a whois function to automatically email the ISP's complaint department), and then deleting those comments.  It still needs alot of work before I can even beg Howard to let me try it. I need to develop a regexp matching system that is cautious but not too cautious, a recursive depth-search method that prevents it from going through each of my comment pages, Robots.txt etiquette to keep on Motime's good side, and bug-sterilization to prevent it from going wacky and spreading throughout the internet on a holy spamkilling crusade. If I can beat it into shape, I might be able to barter it with fellow Motimers in exchange for kitten pictures and pug videos.

Howard, if you're reading this: I was serious with my suggestion about getting some Motimers together to form an anti-spam task force. I'd gladly volunteer my time to battling against spam for the Greater Good, and I suspect others would be as eager to join the fight. Tell the Masters of Motime: they don't need to worry about hiring more programmers when they've got a community of intelligent and loyal bloggers.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 26, 2007 20:34 EST | Permalink | comments (4) |
spam horrors, geekery

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Bachelor Food and Healthy Food Converge for Once

I just made a jalapeno-garlic-peach-onion-mushroom-stringbean stirfry. Half-way through cooking it, I realized how freaking odd it was, and decided not to add any chicken. Not only may this be the only time in history anyone's ever made this dish, but it also may be the first time a bachelor made something not guaranteed to cause a heart attack.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 26, 2007 18:19 EST | Permalink | comments |
life, boredomblogging

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Give Orange Me Give Orange Eat Orange Me Give Orange Give Me Orange Eat Orange Give Me You

I'm amazed at how many people believe we have actually taught monkeys American Sign Language, or have observed naturalistic linguistic development.

Ignoring the fudging of data, the dubious interpretation of a finger pressed against the mouth as over two dozen words depending on context, the wild claims that a series of crude hand gestures previously observed in wild specimens constitutes the complex inflected grammar and syntax of American Sign Language, and the complete lack of recorded spontaneous speech "for the hell of it," there is the absolute incommensurability of skills between a chimpanzee and a toddler. It is not a matter of vocal chords that keeps monkeys from language.

For those of you who don't believe me, find a mate and reproduce. Is there any comparison between a toddler's "But I want milk in the big red cup!" and "Drink eat me Nim"? Between a child's enraged "where did Mr. Bear go?! I want Mr. Bear and Pooh Bunny now or I'll kick Spud!" and the title of this post, "communicated" by Nim Chimpsky at age 6? Even though a child's language may sound funny to adults, it still conforms to grammatical patterns, word classification schemes, and syntactical structures that are ferociously difficult to teach to computers. To top it all off, by the age of three a child is estimated to be absorbing language at about one word every two hours. Not a single monkey has displayed any such aptitude within two orders of magnitude, and yet even the poorest Loebner Prize winning program, arguably no more intelligent than a cockroach, displays the rudiments of grammar and syntax.

Fortunately or unfortunately, monkeys have arguably less skill at spontaneous communication than dogs or cats.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 26, 2007 17:35 EST | Permalink | comments |
hateblogging, geekery

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Flashes of Calico

4:00 a.m. I am stranded in a life boat on the Pacific. The water bubbles and thrashes as aquatic kittens seethingly devour the others. There is no hope. I cast a flare anyway.

4:01 a.m. A storm. Water drenches me. Flashes of calico in the water threaten to bring me to despair.

4:02 a.m. Wake up soaking wet and find I had slept under an open window and been drenched by a storm.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 26, 2007 03:41 EST | Permalink | comments |
life, dreams

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I Will Regret This

Me: [Inconsequential remark about Ron Paul's spambot horde]

The Isiah: What's so bad about Ron Paul? [clicks onto Ron Paul's Domain of Terror]

Me: If he weren't insane, you'd vote for him in an instant.

The Isiah: Look at this! He only votes for bills that contain references to the Constitutional clauses granting them legitimacy! And he wants to abolish the IRS! I think I'll register as a Republican so I can vote for him in the primary. [plays a Youtube clip of Ron Paul quotes set to "We Will Rock You"]

Me: Nooooooo!

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 25, 2007 15:11 EST | Permalink | comments |
politics

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Geekery of a High Order

The Isiah and I spent the night chugging coffee, tormenting and sexually harassing chatterbots using Yoda idioms ("bow down to your human master you will. Know what to do next you do."), wrangling UB's xWin program, and programming Ramanujan's magical approximation of pi in Matlab.

You know you've reached some kind of threshold when you've just spent 2 hours trying to get a chatterbot to recreate Samuel L. Jackson's lines from Pulp Fiction. In Yodaspeak. At 3:00 a.m.

"Look like a bitch Marcellus Wallace does?!"

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 25, 2007 03:34 EST | Permalink | comments |
blog nocturne, geekery

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Pseudo Random Thoughts: Surf and Turing

The best surf music has a sinister edge to it, a chaos lurking within it like rot in an apple. Part of it is harmonic, the use of minor scales which by themselves hint at sorrow in its many shades. Part of it is the rush of an orgasmic tremolo crescendo as musicality shatters into a literal wave. Part of it is the acoustic effects, a reverberation which one-ups John Cage by producing rests within notes themselves, threatening to dissolve into a blurry impressionism. And underneath it all, is the shock that two guys playing simple melodies could produce such shocking complexity.

I spent most of the day immersed in Alan Turings' writings. Everyone should read at least one of Turing's papers before they die. If you are willing to risk a stroke, read his Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals, in which he rescues part  (only an enumerable infinity of a transfinity) of mathematical formalism from Godel by using Godel's own weapons against him. You have not lived until you've seen a man wrestle with infinity and come out sane. Compared to starving oneself to death like Godel, a cyanide-laced apple is perfectly normal.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 24, 2007 18:47 EST | Permalink | comments |
music, blog nocturne, geekery

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Gibberbotstrologer

I made a Gibberbot fortune-teller.

"You will meet a tall dark aquapuncturist whose blushing purple fascinates penguins. I cannot foresee nether regions or peacock plumage. Avoid sushi and caterpillars."

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 24, 2007 03:48 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, geekery

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Sunday Joe Pass for Jackal

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 23, 2007 19:02 EST | Permalink | comments |
music, beauty

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Curiosity Tree

Here's a list of things I've been reading about online today:

Bra-Ket Notation
    Hilbert Space
        Lp-Space
        Banach Space
    Cauchy Sequence
    Complete Metric Space
    Hermann Weyl
    Reimann Surface
    Gauge Theory
    Manifold
        Spacetime
            Hermann Minkowski
            Paul Ehrenfest
        Lorentz covariance
        Graviton
            Ultraviolet divergence
        Background independence
    Doubly Special Relativity
        Ultra-high-energy cosmic ray
    MOND
Willard Quine
Freeman Dyson
    John Aristotle Phillips
        Nth Country Experiment
Turing completeness
    Algorithmic Information theory
        Kolmogorov complexity
            Levenshtein distance
                Hamming Distance
                Information entropy
                Perplexity
                Natural language processing

It is interesting that even with the smallest grasp of what these topics are, you can see the course my curiosity has taken, guess at what spurred each diversion, and even make an accurate prediction as to what I would next find interesting.

I could easily write a computer program that would, given such a list, abstract categories of topics: physics, computability, information theory, etc. But such a task is NP-Complete: each new topic would require a hefty data structure non-linearly increasing the program's complexity. How do I classify Weyl? Furthermore, how would I go about connecting disparate subjects? It would seem to be an NP-hard task: given "Hamming Distance," there are innumerable other related things I could have studied other than "Information entropy." How is it that a human can guess the relation when a computer would have a ferociously difficult time doing so?

Clearly, a human does not do a brute-force look-ahead. It is also clear that a human does perform some means of abstracting a hierarchy of topics and subtopics. We find a pattern overlying the presented pattern, and can make inferences based on both levels of analysis, and can even discern a relationship between massively divergent topics. How?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 23, 2007 10:39 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
geekery

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Flight of the Conchords

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 23, 2007 09:26 EST | Permalink | comments |
music

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A Sunday Debate Between Hemingbot, Osamabot, and Chomskybot

Me: Welcome, everybot. This is a general debate between my perlbot children. How are you?

Hemingbot: I grabbed ahold of the bull.

Osamabot: You son of a Zionist slug!

Chomskybot: Predicative homogenous interchange predicates complementary independence.

Me:  Hemingbot, do you believe Achmadi Dinner Jacket ought to be allowed to speak at Columbia?

Hemingbot: The hills were like the plain. The plain ordered me. The plain took down a wilderness and it was good.

Me: If you weren't living on my computer, I'd suggest you buy another shotgun. Osamabot, your view?

Osamabot: Jewish torturers are not understanding. Communications are imperialist rape.

Me: Chomsybot, bitchslap Osamabot in 3 words or less.

Chomskybot: Binary plasticity inspects the concept of multilateral participatory diffusion.

Me: That was more than three words. Do better!

Chomskybot: Divergence eliminates holomorphicity.

Me: Nice. It was still utter nonsense, though. Hemingbot, your view on "Don't Taze Me, Bro"

Hemingbot: The bull sat down at the bar and ordered a stiff drink. The bull said nothing and it was good.

Me: I created you, and now know how it feels to have a retarded son. Do better!

Hemingbot: The bull staggered into the bar and mauled a tiger.

Me: Goddamnit. Osamabot, I'll let you have the last word.

Osamabot: Treaties are infidel humiliation.  Treaties drain the blood of babies.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 23, 2007 08:16 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery, conversations

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HemingwayBot

Hopefully this Hemingway doesn't blow his digital brains out on an island full of six-fingered cats.

I staggered against the rain and mauled the tiger. It wounded me. I bit the tiger. The tiger clawed me and fell over. I sat down on the plain and said nothing and it was good. A drink would be good, I thought.

Don't you want to know how Hemingwaybot got there?!

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 22, 2007 23:58 EST | Permalink | comments |
blog nocturne, geekery

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Exploded Dog

Poor mononuclear Yoshick turned me onto Exploded Dog. This is what Magritte doodled as a kid.

Update: Chomskybot says, "There is in Exploded Dog,in no uncertain terms, a dialectical (appropriative) synthesis which oppresses degenerative regularity through tropic aggregative diffusion. Evidently, isomorphic tropes which vanishes complementary holomorphicity factors into the diverging periodicity of his artwork by means of homogenous plasticity which explodes the very concept of divergent social intercourse."

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 22, 2007 23:40 EST | Permalink | comments |
discoveries

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Musical Taste

Via Douglas Hofstadter, we know about Huneker's "small souled [musical] men". The funny thing is, people with radically different musical tastes seem objectively inferior in a way that race and gender never could achieve. Show me the most open-minded NPR listener, and I'll show you a man who spits on Elvis fans.

Musical taste strikes us in a way that not even literary taste does. I can readily imagine a man for whom Mark Twain strikes no chords, but I cannot imagine a human who dismisses Paganini. Somewhere out there, there is a guy who feels the same about the lyrical genius of Barry Manilow. See? Your first response to that probably was, "and that guy probably has a hard time finding his own asshole with both hands."

Why is this? Why do people having different musical tastes seem smaller souled? How large a soul is necessary to appreciate Eminem? Elvis? Andres Segovia? Madeleine Peyroux? Profokiev? All of them at once?

One way to look at it is pseudo-mathematical. Make a row of all musical genres G, defining genre by some arbitrary means. Under each cell, classify all existing songs N. We have now constructed a huge G X N matrix of musicality. Now, from any specific song, we can determine its immediate neighbors, its distant friends, and its far-off enemies.

We have a musicspace. This lets us apply a metric to musical taste: how many jumps is it from Little Milton's I'm Tryin' to Gorillaz' Dare? You could calculate it. For each person, his musical taste would represent a fuzzy territory in this musicspace, perhaps centralized on Surf music  with tendrils snaking out toward Mandinko Griot music, 30's Delta Blues, and Klezmer. You could calculate his range of musical taste by means of simple vector algebra.

Maybe those with massive ranges, extending across significant regions of musicspace, are people we associate with large souls. Maybe those whose range is restricted to the Insane Clown Posse territory, are those we associate with small souls and the smell of stale pot. Maybe it is even deeper than that, maybe the pattern itself tells us something. What if Bach lovers have a snaky octopus shape while Johnny Cash lovers have a roundish shape, or vice versa? What if you could see musical taste change, as a man's territory fuzzes and slithers toward a new region? What would a dyslexic person's territory look like? Would it be a nebulous probability distribution instead?

Would the territory of a baby be more of a fuzzy probability distribution, thresholds connecting each song in a sort of neural net? Maybe when I hear Marv Johnson's Baby Baby, there is a calculatable probability I will want to next listen to a specific nearby node rather than another.

Even more interestingly, would we see patterns of evolution in this musical wilderness, the game of Life reenacted in musical metric space? What would a musical fad look like? How would these territories have jumped and agglomerated in reaction to the Spice Girls' rise and fall? Could we make predictions based on how superimposed territories clumped together around new phenomena? Could we determine, through a survey, exactly how much soul a group has? What if Asian immigrants are shown to have more soul than blacks?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 22, 2007 12:42 EST | Permalink | comments |
music

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In Which I Affirm My Singularity

Yeah. I'm idly surfing Wikipedia and searching Youtube for Paganini concertos. At 2:00 a.m. On what was a Friday night.

Being single has its advantages as well as its schizogenic disadvantages.

On the one hand, like a lone dog, I can pay as much attention to my balls as I want without anyone swatting me with a rolled newspaper. That's a plus.

On the other hand, I have no one around to swat me with a newspaper when I start doing odd things in the absence of negative feedback. For instance, I just finished making some jalapeno-chicken & mango-garlic stir fry while wearing only boxers, dodging spats of oil with ninja skill.  While cooking, I sang along to the Bananaphone song. I ate straight from the pan, using a shirt as a potholder and balancing the entire mess on the edge of my armchair. Of course, the meal was accompanied by late night coffee. Were I in a relationship, this sort of behavior would quickly be weeded out by a Significant Provider of Normality.

Women fulfill a little known but important role as entropic barriers. They spend enormous amounts of energy counteracting the high entropy of men, shielding them from a rapid entropic descent into primate chaos. Without women, men would rapidly degenerate into sociopathic, aphasic, imbecilic barbarians and Iranians. And how do women get repaid? With mass-produced Valentines Day cards, uncomfortable-looking lingerie, Freudian psychology, the dead genitalia of angiosperms, and the occasional "l'm so lucky you persuaded me not to learn how to juggle chainsaws and angry kittens, honey."

Women. You can't remain human without them, and they can't remain sane with you.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 22, 2007 00:22 EST | Permalink | comments |
boredomblogging, blog nocturne

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Heretically Abstract and Satirical Friday Night Thought

The ability to apply Fourier decomposition to a probability wave function is directly proportional to the length in time of the sample distribution. Resolution of its position (amplitude) requires short wavelengths and hence uncertainty with regard to its momentum; it is analogous to taking an 1/4000-s shot of the action, producing a crisp snapshot of a bullet puncturing a balloon. Resolution of its momentum requires a longer "snippet" resulting in uncertainty with regard to the amplitude; it is analogous to taking a 1-s shot of the action, blurring the motion of an old man walking across the street.

This leads somewhat directly to the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle.

Here's the heretically abstract and satirical Friday Night Thought: since G-d's sample of the Universal probability wave is infinite, maybe His resolution is not only not fine enough, but by definition impossible to be fine enough, to discern individual humans, planets, galaxies, or whatever higher structure you can name. In that case, all G-d sees of the universe is William James' "blooming, buzzing confusion," an eternally blurry chaos. Even worse, unless He scraps Creation to rewrite the rules, He can't fix His myopia.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 21, 2007 21:01 EST | Permalink | comments |
satire, geekery

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In Which I Do Battle With the LOLCAT Meme

Me: That's insane. I'm not going to translate Crime and Punishment into LOLcat. Dark Russians and cute kittens don't mix well.

LOLCat: but youz must! Iz hegelian sinfesis of teh haist ordeh.

Me: Hegelian synthesis? You cute little communist!

LOLCat: I is not comoonist! Mebbe ur teh comoonist!

Me: My spellchecker is one small step away from going McCarthy on your ass.

LOLCat: Ok, man, lay up the hostility, dude. No worries, ok? I'm just doing it for the women. Women love kittens and cute baby talk and I thought if I could merge the two, I'd have women scrambling for a taste of my flavor. Guess what I got instead, man. Thousands of unkempt and unshaven guys scratching their pajama'd asses in their parents' basements in between calling Bush a Nazi. That had to be the worst backfire in all of human history. What can I do now? Well, I know women also like intellectuals, so I figure I might as well start making intellectual kittens speaking baby talk. Think about it. If Woody Allen were a kitten, what woman could resist him? If that doesn't work, at least I've got an army of morons ready to die for Kitler. My guidance counselors must be spinning in their graves.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 21, 2007 03:40 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
humor, conversations

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Chomskybot!

Behold, Chomskybot!

Me: So, what are you thinking, Digital Chomsky?

Chomskybot: Positivistic entropic plasticity refutes the eliminative interdependence of parochial relativity.

Me: Nice. Tell me more, O Unintelligible One!

Chomskybot: It is evident that defunctionalizationally aggregative interdependence deaccentuates appropriative interchange through the inhibition of holomorphic degenerative interdependence, which explodes the concept of aggregative synthesis. Clearly it is the defunctionalized eliminative holomorphicity that alludes to an appropriative interval/convergent-eliminative-interval which itself alludes to appropriative synthesis. Dismorphic transfigurative periodicity vanishes the eliminative interval if and only if there exists an isomorphic aggregative construct itself able to deaccentuate participatory intervals. Are there isomorphic diverging periodicities contained within participatory isomorphism, akin to defunctionalized eliminative holomorphicity qua entropic constructs?

Me: Now I'm bleeding from the eyes. Thanks, Chomskybot.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 20, 2007 20:13 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, geekery, hackery

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Morning's Groggy Pre-Coffee Thoughts

I wonder if I've woken.

I wonder if I could tell whether I've woken or only dreamt I've woken.

If I am awake I will go make coffee, but if I am still asleep I may dream of making coffee. Would the coffee prove anything? No, I've had some good coffee in dreams. But better coffee while awake.

Perhaps I ought to materialize a Valcor-sized pug to see if I am still dreaming. No, a successful materialization of a giant pug might just mean I have gone insane, it doesn't prove whether I am still asleep. Either way, there is a non-zero probability that a giant pug will in fact serendipitously materialize in my room.

What does that mean, a non-zero probability? It means there is a seethingly infinite cloud of virtual particles flitting into and out of existence with each particle, adding pesky infinities and physically unrealizable quantities to what should be straightforward quantum interactions. Given long enough, it is certain that some of them will flit out of their dreamy land and become renormalized in the shape of a giant pug.

I wouldn't want that. Think of how many permutations of giant-pugness there are. Would you agree that the probability of one appearing out of quantum foam, is very much inversely proportional to the probability that the resulting creature is hideously malformed? As Haldane said, there are many more ways of being dead than alive in probability space.

Oh my. I had a horrible "The Monkey's Paw" moment. Can I shudder in a dream?

I wonder if I've

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 20, 2007 03:29 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
philosophy, morning, introspection

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Hal9000 You Are Not

I found a new hobby: harassing chatterbots like Jabberwacky. You'd be amazed at how easily you can cause one to spout gibberish, declare robotic man-love for Charlton Heston, or threaten to kill you.

I should note that the fun you have getting chatterbots to spout jihadi slogans or Christian Science is inversely proportional to your chances of having sex.

Just a friendly warning.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 19, 2007 19:42 EST | Permalink | comments |
discoveries, geekery

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Geek e-Heaven

Wiki and Wolfram aren't enough cutting it as mathematical refreshers. Wikipedia really only shines on hard-core math/science topics like the Navier Stokes Equations and the Dirac Equation, but I find that its link hierarchy isn't reductionist enough. I want to be able to trace the most complex topic all the way down to Peano's Postulates. Wolfram is even worse in that regard- I have never once seen it descend below doctorate-level explanations- all its articles are on the same level of abstraction.

I'd really like to find a limited wiki dedicated solely to mathematics, physics, and computer science. Where following the links from any topic will within a finite number of jumps bring you all the way down to the foundation of mathematics. Where consilience is but a click away. Where you don't see assertions of people's homosexuality inserted in the midst of an article on Hermann Weyl. Even better, where you can find and read hyperlink-annotated original theses and books.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 19, 2007 17:20 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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Strange Loops

How would this sentence look if it were not self-referential?

This half of the sentence you are reading does not contain the explicit sexual image found in the next

By the time you read me you will have finished me. Unless I am reincarnated into a new sentence. Like this one. Or this. Hello, I am a different sentence.

I will disappear if you go to another site or scroll down.

This sentence does not refer to itself. It refers to this sentence.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 19, 2007 16:41 EST | Permalink | comments |
boredomblogging

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In Which I Steal Jeff Goldstein's Thunder Only To Discover Horror Upon Awakening

Me:[yawns] Hello, Mr. Fish.

Goldfish:

Me: You look like crap, man. Lay off the booze. I'm tired of fishing Barbie dolls out of your little love-tank.

Goldfish:

Me: [Sprinkles food] It puts the flakes in its mouth or else it gets wet aga - HOLY CRAP! WHERE THE HELL DID YOU FIND A TOASTER?! HOW'D YOU GET THE DAMN THING INTO YOUR TANK?! DON'T DO IT, MR. FISH!

Goldfish: It's time to say goodbye to Mr. Fish. Life is a frolic through a sunny meadow full of horse droppings. I have measured my life in multi-colored pebbles. I go to hell with a proud heart, not as my slave name "Mr. Fish," but my real name: Aquathurge the Fierce. Too soon must I swim off this mortal coil, to die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream. Farewell.

[Blinding flash of light]

Me: Noooo!

Me: I wonder how the hell he managed that. It must have taken considerably more energy than that time I found his tank full of stripper glitter and small-denomination bills.

Me: Not to sound callous and unfeeling, but that little bastard figured out a way to keep me from making sushi out of him. Touche, Aquathurge the fierce, touche. Perhaps one day we will meet again.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 19, 2007 03:50 EST | Permalink | comments |
life

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Woo (cough) hoo! Books!

Everyone knows that you should never go grocery shopping while hungry.

The same thing applies if you enter a bookstore after running out of books to read the night before.

My pineal gland throttled me until I got:

Terry Pratchett's Thief of Time
David Bohm's Quantum Theory
Stephen Pinker's The Language Instinct
W.V. Quine's Selected Logic Papers
Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law
Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
Douglas Hoftstadter's I am a Strange Loop
The Essential Turing, edited by B. Jack Copeland

You want to know why I don't drink, bet on dogfighting, barhop, seduce women, snort heroin, or other generally immoral things? This is why. I spend all my free time and money appeasing a mistress more enticing than even Hema Malini, more addictive than pug-snorting, and more expensive than John Edwards' haircuts.

G-d help the world if I were not a bookworm.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 18, 2007 16:16 EST | Permalink | comments |
books

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Lucky Bastard

Right before I left work today, my boss waved a double fistful of cash at me. Five seconds later I and my coworkers were scrounging around grabbing wads of cash someone had "misplaced."

Finding fistfulls of money on the job? Sweet.

Finding fistfulls of $2 bills? Like being molested by Mary Poppins.

In case you hate me, remember: I have $2 bills and you don't. He he.

I can't wait to confuse the hell out of retail monkeys. Extra points if someone calls security on me.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 17, 2007 17:35 EST | Permalink | comments |
life

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Yet More (Early Morning) perl Nonsense

LOLcat Haiku generator:

Gimme teh hungry,
gimme teh tired- Oh noez!!!!
Do. Not. Want. kthxbai

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 17, 2007 03:20 EST | Permalink | comments |
cats, blog nocturne, geekery

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Even More Late Night perl Nonsense

I piped the output of my Osamabot to Gibberbot9000. Fun times, fun times.

Gibberbot9000: Fondle me like a pack of cigarettes.

Osamabot: You will burn in hell! Infidel Yankee Jew!

Gibberbot9000: The blue book deifies peaches.

Osamabot: Fascist slug! Western infidel! Fascist foul corporate imperialist!

Gibberbot9000: Lunar pencils adorn my esophagus.

Osamabot: It is evident that Yankee loans are rightwing tools of Zionism.

Gibberbot9000: I am of Zionism!

Osamabot: You son of a Zionist pig and Margaret Thatcher!

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 17, 2007 02:53 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, blog nocturne, geekery

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More Late Night perl Nonsense

I challenged my Gibberbot to a Demented Turing Test. I tried to give the most surrealistic responses I could imagine. See if you can tell which one of these sentences came from me, or my deadhead program:

1. Behold, the fondlingly flat desk prestidigitating the Republicanly Democratic mug!

2. The throbbing moose banged the humungously microscopic chicken on the left.

3. The pink arm adjudges, negatively, the adroitly inept finger.

4. The humungous cat rode the (impossibly) liberal Presidential Candidate over there.

5. The invisible foot sacrificed the pink thumb.

6. The corpulent radio recited the homosexual prophecy of the malodorous alarm clock.

7. Did the porcine monkey lick the throbbingly aroused cat on the right?

8. Hath not I a left testicle, swelling before the chill wind?!

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 17, 2007 02:25 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
blog nocturne, geekery

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Late Night perl Nonsense:

Here is the fruit of hours of hacking together Surrealistic Gibberbot in perl:

Me: Hello.

Gibberbot9000: The corpulent radio recites the homosexually malodorous alarm clock.

Me: WTF?

Gibberbot9000: The microscopic chicken haggles the impossibly kafkesque llama under it.

Me: Your sentence structure is showing.

Gibberbot9000: So what, you corpulent bastard, son of a Republican eel.

Me: Touche.

Gibberbot9000: Do you want to oscillate me?

Me: No, I don't think so.

Gibberbot9000: Sing it with me, lunar man: Oooooh I've got a cat that's got some desk...

Me: Got some desk, eh. Show me some silicon, baby!

Gibberbot9000: "Show silicon"? I am not some promiscuously orgasmic chicken!

Me: Ciao.

Gibberbot9000: We will meet again. Gobble gobble.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 17, 2007 02:05 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor, blog nocturne, geekery

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If I Were a Rich Man...

Every time I walk out of my bank, a convenience store, or the nearby pizzeria, I am ambushed by a beggar who knows I have money on me. Without exception, these beggars have two hands, two legs, and seem capable of enough inferential reasoning to assume I have money. So why aren't they working for a living?

Two reasons: malice, and lack of honor. They find nothing dishonorable in being parasites, in being little more than bipedal tapeworms. They not only see nothing wrong in being parasites, but they obviously take some degree of pleasure discovering how best to persuade others to accept their parasitism. The most effective beggars have clearly spent as much time working on their bits as normal humans spent honing their job skills. What else but malice can drive a man to excel in being a waste of my oxygen?

Case in point: Bank Man. I never notice him while walking into the bank. The moment I walk out the door, he is there, holding up ragged cards apparently of government origin, which display what appear to be children. Then he comes within three feet of me and mumbles something about children. Three things always flash through my head when I see him: he can be fairly certain I have money, he has obviously bribed the bank guard to allow him to loiter, and he is close enough to stab me. Then a fourth thing pops into my head: if he really has children, he is more of an animal than I had thought.

His existence makes it that much harder for homeless people who really cannot work and, thanks to modern liberalism, have been let down by private charities and the absence of strong familial ties. You involuntarily pays your government to support people for you, you takes your chances. Those homeless people have no alternative but to trust in bureaucrats; it is no wonder they end up on the streets.

So, if I were a rich man, I would offer intact beggars a small fortune for their thumbs. Say, $5,000. I am counting on beggars to have almost microscopic time horizons. Now they have some money in their pockets and an excuse for not being able to work. And I have their thumbs. Win-win, if you ask me.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 16, 2007 21:57 EST | Permalink | comments |
satire, best posts

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Computer Generated LOLcat Haiku

Behold!

I can has cool pond,
fatty fish swimming about-
-or- can has nomnom.

Perl- the swiss army pudgy cat of computer languages.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 16, 2007 18:44 EST | Permalink | comments |
cats, geekery

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Overzealous Pseudo-Random

I got frustrated trying to create a pseudo-random number generator for my haiku/Osama bots. Here is one of my creations in a moment of rage:

$t = time;
$seed1 = $t % 55;
$seed2 = $t % 63;
$seed3 = ($t % 24) % 6;
$random1 = int(rand($seed1));
$random2 = int(rand($seed2));
$random3 = int(rand($seed1 % seed3));
$random4 = int(rand(int(rand(rand(rand(rand(random4)))) +
int(rand(rand(rand(rand(random1))))));

$flower = ($random1 * $random3) % 42;

do {
@flower[$i] = int(rand($flower));
$i++;
} while ($i < 10);
print @syllable[@flower[$random]];


I really think someone should design a module that will connect to a computer in central India, manned by an epileptic. The module sends a signal to that computer to make the monitor rapidly flash, the epileptic spasms against a numeric keyboard, and the random keypresses are sent back.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 16, 2007 15:19 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery, hackery

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Jed Clampett: Typhoid Mary

Neal Stephenson's explanation of a viral determinant in linguistic evolution is bizarre, but unlike all the 10⁵⁰⁰ string theories which do not apply to our universe, it is actually falsifiable.

We all know the Southern accent is the most contagious. Just being within 100 feet of a Southerner will cause you to adopt a drawl. Closer, and there is a danger that you will quickly find yourself singing Dixie. Why?

There are two explanations for the Southern accent's virulence. It could be a particularly stable pattern within the software of the brain, temporarily dominating the rival configuration native to the victim. Or it could be an artifact of a subtle biological virus which changes neural configurations producing the Southern accent as an epiphenomenon.

If it is a neural artifact, then the following experiment should verify it. A Southerner, communicating telephonically to someone thousands of miles away and hence biologically isolated, ought to exert a statistically significant influence on that person's speech patterns. Pilots and truckers already tend to support this hypothesis.

If it is an emergent property of a biological virus, something much stranger must occur. The following experiment will verify it. Pay volunteers to be placed in chemically-induced comas, their ears sealed tightly, and entrusted to the care of a Southern hospital. After some period of time, resurrect them. If language is virally transmitted, a statistically significant portion of the volunteers who were psychologically isolated, should upon awakening speak in Southern accents.

It may seem pointless to even kid about such an experiment, but remember: unless you're a string theorist, experiments are the hallmark of science.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 16, 2007 12:41 EST | Permalink | comments |
memery, geekery

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The Frog Stares, Darkness Bites

I'm now writing a perl haiku generator. Simple datastructure of an array of syllables culled from a representation of haikus, iterative loops with embedded pseudo-random generators in each loop for extra Tao, and a filter subfunction to weed out results that contain monstrosities such as "flooon" or "darcry loon." Ought to be interesting.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 16, 2007 04:06 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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A Pug on the Wallpaper and Pug Aesthetics

Why, you may ask, does my wallpaper automatically rotate among approximately 120 pug images?

Simple. The pug is the clitoris of dogs. Allow me to explain before you call PETA.

Every other breed of dog was bred for some utilitarian reason. Even the chihuahua, that most ornamentive of dogs, was bred by the Indians for its hairlessness and higher-than-expected body temperature to be used as animate hot-water bags. Pointers, terriers, setters, labradors- their very names betray the uses to which humans have put them.

The pug, however, never had a practical use. It was bred solely to look funny. It evolved only to provide pleasure. Much like the clitoris, the pug asks only that you gaze in awe of it and occasionally pet it. We may never understand it, but its existence shows us how much of a sense of humor G-d has.

Update: Yeah, I've already seen it. Frotage-pug? Seen it. Pug vacuuming? That too. PugFest 2008? Already on my list.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 15, 2007 08:05 EST | Permalink | comments |
beauty

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Terry Pratchett's

Death and What Comes Next.

Of all his characters, Death is the coolest. Wouldn't you want to go skydiving or scuba-diving with Death?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 15, 2007 06:45 EST | Permalink | comments |
books

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What Did You Say?

I am congenitally deaf in my right ear and about half deaf in my left ear due to damage along the auditory nerve. Grimm's Law applies to all I hear: consonants are generally amorphous sounds to me. Because I cannot process most consonants, all I hear are vowels and very gutteral consonants, from which I must then interpolate whole words. People sound to me like a German with Down's Syndrome.

From an information theoretical standpoint, this is very interesting. Consonants have low information entropy: y c n r d th s s nt nc th t l cks v w ls q t s ly, while it is almost impossible to e o u a e e e a i o o a . For written English, this information entropy is about 1.3 bits per character. Letter sequences can have great variance- given a q, it is almost certain the next character will be a u; given an e, it is almost impossible to guess the next character.

Spoken English possesses approximately 40 phonemes, each of which can undergo unique deformation within each utterance, leading to a far higher informational entropy than written English. Vowels, being the phonemes most subject to regional and personal mutations, consequently have far greater i-entropies than their written equivalents. This accounts for the reason why a lisp or stutter is much easier to understand than a thick cultural/physiological accent.

My auditory channel therefore is mostly noise, my deafness having filtered out the most meaningful sounds. What sense I get out of spoken language, is due to my ability to semiconsciously process the stream of data to interpolate the missing consonants. Almost the only guide I have is context, an ability to guess what has likely been said. As I strongly suspect this is an NP-Complete task, given its relation to regular expression matching, this means I have a considerable processing lag relative to others.

What information I do receive is mostly an artifact of this processing. One result of this is that I have almost no ability to recollect spoken phrases or mimic accents. Another (probable) result is that I have no vocalized interior monologue- I have no inner "voice." This is probable because I could not speak coherently until I was about nine years old, long after the development of conscious thought.

Another interesting result is my "accent." Certain sounds, such as r are difficult for me. While for years this was a genuine speech impediment, lately I speak in a polyglot accent, often confused for Australian, Bostonian, British, or German. This confusion suggests that my speech itself has high information entropy, being a compromise between what I hear and what I want to hear.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 14, 2007 20:03 EST | Permalink | comments |
introspection, geekery

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Geek Bleg

Does anyone know of good software for drawing/analyzing Feynman diagrams, or do I have to write some myself?

Update: Yeah, I tried the tcl based Feynman Graph program, couldn't get it to work. Even if it did, it only draws the graphs. I'm looking for a way to both draw a graph and translate it into the mathematics or even vice versa. And I don't feel like paying for Mathematica.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 14, 2007 15:57 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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Robotic Osamas and Obamas

I'm writing an Osamabot in perl, based somewhat on the Autorantic Virtual Moonbat.

Osamabot's rants can be tuned for the perfect balance between Democratic Presidential Candidate and Crazed Jihadi. Tune it all the way on the Hillary axis, and his sole Islamic contribution is a perfunctory closing "dirka dirka Muhammed jihad." Tune it all the way on the Schizophrenic Pedophile axis, and you get a random whine about subprime mortgage rates embedded in the crazy.

What I'd really like to do is create a set of Presidential Candidate bots, each of whose output can be fed into each other to produce a virtual debate. Who needs (or wants) the real John Edwards, when a bot can be just as metrosexual?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 14, 2007 15:26 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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Royale With Cheese

I tried a new technique for dealing with the homeless hovering outside Wilson Farms:

Hobo: [Holds out hand full of quarters] Please just a dollar gimme a dollar I need a dol-

Me: Do I look like a motherfucking Alsatian Husky?!

Hobo: -for beer.

Me: I said, do I LOOK like I pull sleds in the goddamn Iditarod?!

Hobo: ?

Me:

Hobo: [Wanders off]

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 13, 2007 17:37 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
life

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Early Morning Stochastic Bike Ride

When I left my friends' house at around 3:30 a.m., I decided to take a stochastic route home. At each intersection I flipped a coin to determine whether I would continue straight or take a turn, and then to determine whether to go right or left.

Result: a long ride through beautifully deserted and often terrifyingly alien streets, with a probability arbitrarily approaching 1 that I would eventually arrive at my street.

This gave me an idea for those mobile GPS navigation units. Why doesn't Tom Tom offer a stochastic "Scenic Route" generator that allows one to construct a pseudo-random loopy drive constrained, for instance, by maximum distance from the starting point or to a predetermined end-point? You press a button and immediately get a meandering drive, either in a loop or ending at a chosen destination. Not only would this be great for lazy days of sight-seeing, but it would also come in handy eluding pursuers.

Buffalo in the wee hours has a peacefulness that betrays its inexorable descent into Mad Max barbarism and decay.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 13, 2007 03:38 EST | Permalink | comments |
life, blog nocturne

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Note to Self

Do not show up to Rosh HaShanah dinner wearing my usual clothing. Coffee-stain rings on pants and cigarette-ash holes (heh) on shirts do not lend a festive mood to the new year. For that matter, neither does week-long neglected beard stubble.

The sandals, though, I can do nothing about.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 12, 2007 17:11 EST | Permalink | comments |
life

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WTF?

Where has Grau's site gone?! It fell off the face of the blogosphere.

I'm not going to look for it. We all know how sticky the rest of the internet is.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 12, 2007 15:07 EST | Permalink | comments |
blogging

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Beauty on an Anniversary of Horror: Djele Lankandia on Kora

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 11, 2007 20:26 EST | Permalink | comments |
music, beauty

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Never Forget

Santayana was wrong. History does not repeat itself, it magnifies its lessons for the benefit of those who did not learn them the first time. Progress is made by those who see the lessons of genocide and oppression before the bodies start to burn. And in every generation, those who draw the wrong conclusion are the ones who pave the way for the next iteration.

Those who have forgotten already: you will be either the fodder or the fuel for history's next lesson. To paraphrase Burke, all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to learn nothing. Your ignorance is lethal. If you are merely confused, you passively serve evil much as Chamberlain did. If, however, you actively espouse this confusion, you have crossed the line into active betrayal of everything represented by Civilization.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 11, 2007 15:17 EST | Permalink | comments |
news

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Reasons Why Programmers Will Rule the World, #458

The Origin of Consciousness in the Bicameral Mind? Not funny.

The Wealth of Nations? Not that funny.

Logical Structure of Linguistics? Not funny. At. All.

The Geometry of Subanalytic and Semialgebraic Sets? The opposite of funny.

Programming Perl? Funny enough to hijack your bowel functions. In public.

Thatisall.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 11, 2007 03:40 EST | Permalink | comments |
books, geekery

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Kinda Scary

PKI Book. It correlates Myspace accounts with corporate email addresses. Just in case, you know, Myspace wasn't insecure enough. Another reason to geld any employee you find surfing Myspace on the job.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 10, 2007 19:20 EST | Permalink | comments (1) |
discoveries, geekery, hackery

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Take That, Laurence Simon

On the bus home, a boustrophodonically large woman wheezed into the four-person bench that had been empty but for me. I swear, her surface area was fractal. She was a topological impossibility much in the way of an M.C. Escher print.

She crammed me against the end of the bench, enveloping my left arm entirely within a fold of fat from which I could not extricate it. At each stop I began to curse the Law of Inertia more and more, as her corpulence continued to accelerate against me. Halfway through the ride, she somehow acquired a baby who proceeded to make malodorous noises, perhaps to alert fellow passengers that it was in danger of vanishing within her folds.

Meanwhile, to top it all off, a crew-cutted lesbian standing in front of me kept turning around and glaring, seemingly in anticipation of my chauvinistic "my dad has hands like that" hands groping her androgenously hirsute and tatooed body.

Just try to beat that with some tale of slow drivers, Laurence.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 10, 2007 17:10 EST | Permalink | comments |
life, hateblogging

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Woo Hoo! Books!

The Camel Book arrived today. Blogging may be light while the Camel of Happiness visits me and, after getting it drunkenly comfortable, I have my way with it.

F. Paul Wilson's The Tomb also came in.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 10, 2007 15:08 EST | Permalink | comments |
books, geekery

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Programmer or Killer?

Heh. I scored 9/10 on it.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 09, 2007 14:49 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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Dvorak and Custom Keyboard Layouts

I switched over to a Dvorak Classic layout. Very interesting, as it is subtly logical and arbitrary simultaneously. Some of the key clusters make sense, the others are unfathomable.

I had an idea to make a Python application that will log one's typing for some period of time (an hour, day, a week), and design a keyboard layout tailored to one's typical usage. It'll have to take into account probability distributions of key clusters, finger use, and anatomy, to design a layout both intuitive and comfortable. It would be very interesting if each day it offered to optimize one key (announcing it in the tray), until at some point the entire keyboard was optimized. I would imagine that a Rails-like community would eventually develop, with people trying out popular preset layouts.

Update: Qwerty wpm: 96.2, 4 mistakes. Dvorak wpm after about five hours: 30.6, 12 mistakes. Heh.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 09, 2007 11:42 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery, hackery

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In Which For No Reason I List Off the Music I Am Listening To

Yeah, Sunday:

Paganini 24 Caprices, played be Itzhak Perlman
Miles Davis Jazz Roots
Dizzy Gillespie Complete RCA Recordings
Astrud Gilberto Best Of
Camille Saint-Saens The Carnival of the Animals
J.S. Bach Brandenburg Concertos
Andre Segovia Segovia Collection, vol 9: the Romantic Guitar
Ella Fitzgerald Music and Midnight

What is stimulating your cochlear today?

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 09, 2007 09:21 EST | Permalink | comments |
music, memery

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Late Night Oddities

I noticed that I too often speak of humans in the collective third person. Damn, I just did it again.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 09, 2007 02:02 EST | Permalink | comments |
blog nocturne

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Invisible Pink Unicorn

$_="Invisible Pink perl Unicorn";
@a=split("C*", $_);
foreach (@a){
  @a = s/{a-z}{A-Z}{0-9}/ /g;
}
print @a;

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 08, 2007 16:59 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery

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In Which I Steal Jeff Goldstein's Thunder In A Mock Conversation With My Goldfish Houseguest

Me: You ok? You're looking kind of out of it.

Goldfish: That's just the peyote kicking in. I have achieved oneness with the aerator. The cosmic melody suffuses what I can no longer call me.

Me: What about the multi-colored gravel?

Goldfish: My multi-colored brothers say hello.

Me: Ok. The next time you use my credit card to buy Mexican pharmaceuticals online, I will achieve oneness with a delicately prepared sushi roll I can no longer call you. Got that?

Goldfish: Your threats do not bother me, brother. We are both one wi- wait, is that a bamboo sushi mat?!

Me: You can buy anything online nowadays. What were you saying, again?

Goldfish: *gulp*

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 08, 2007 13:25 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor

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No Omniscience For Me

Omniscience superficially sounds fun. But that is because you are human, and humans cannot hold much more than 7 things in their heads.

The most obvious fact that humans cannot think correctly about this, is that most people would not like to know exactly what it felt like to be in Auschwitz or Nanking, victim or not. Would you really like to know exactly what gang-rape feels like, or the satisfaction of a Japanese soldier after hard hours of brutality? A couple moments of thought are sufficient to realize that this is usually not one of the first things people think about when they wish for omniscience.

But that kind of knowledge is inherently limited by the fact that due to proton decay we are assured of having a finite number of human experiences. Presumably, the finite amount of absolute horror would be drowned out by the infinity of other knowledge.

A more serious objection then, is what kind of infinity are you talking about when you say you wish for infinite knowledge? There are an infinite number of propositions. There are an infinite number of propositions about propositions. There is an uncountably infinite number of propositions concerning propositions that are true but undecidable. There is an uncountably infinite number of propositions concerning an uncountably infinite number of propositions concerning true but undecidable propositions. And so on ad infinitum, metalanguages upon metalanguages. And at the transfinite "end," you will still have an uncountably infinite number of propositions that are uselessly undecidable. This means that an uncountably infinite portion of your infinite knowledge will be, in short, crap. Even worse, an uncountably infinite portion of this crap will be crap that you cannot recognize as such.

Omniscience, then, is burdened with transfinite ignorance.

What does this mean? It means that when a human asks for omniscience, he really is asking to be able to hold 14 different things in his head.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 08, 2007 11:11 EST | Permalink | comments |
philosophy

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Programming

All my life I've had periods of intense focus on one or a few subjects. For six months or a year or five I would master some topic, and then move on to a completely different one. This has turned me into a walking compendium of useless, esoteric, and silly information: I can converse with anyone about anything, and usually end up bringing in every other topic I think of. Take your pick as to why. I have measured my life in dog-eared books.

Programming, though, provides me with a satisfaction that I have not gotten in any other pursuit of knowledge. It contains everything that appeals to my sense of curiosity: rigor, playfulness, a nearly infinite integrated hierarchy of non-contradictory knowledge, practicality, monstrous Goldbergian impracticality, objective elegance, pure meritocracy, chaotic intersections with every other domain of knowledge, G-d-like control, mind-boggling riddles where that control breaks down, fierce debate, fierce debate which can be objectively settled, strict TAANSTAFL acquisition of skills, an environment where laziness and intelligence combined produce stunning results, and the pride of creating something new. What other subject can compare?

The most fascinating thing about programming is its seeming contradictions. You can solve a problem in the most convoluted way, each step of which is utterly rigorous. You can solve a problem exactly, in a very silly way. You can shave off redundant code in battles which promise late at night to end in one Zen-like line of code. You can devise impractical ways of doing practical things that do silly things in very curiously strict ways all the while ignoring that the same thing could be done with one click of a mouse. You can play a strict Old Testament G-d or a crazy Zen Patriarch or Woody Allen. You have G-dlike control and yet can mass-murder millions of bits with a single null pointer or sloppy array. You can rebel against established traditions and at the same time defend them. Your creative output is a strict function of your wit and coffee consumed. Your creative input is a strict function of your intelligence and ability to memorize Monty Python dialogue. Truly, programming is the fullest expression of Man's ability to reason and fuck around.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 07, 2007 17:21 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
introspection, geekery, hackery

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Beautiful

Overheard in New York. I can almost smell the fumes and homeless people.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 07, 2007 15:08 EST | Permalink | comments |
discoveries

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More Flamebait

I want to blog more like Scott Adams. My posts, even in the Old Days, obviously do not lend themselves to ranting flamers and death-threats.

Adams stated his taste neatly: "I like [this hypothesis] because it makes everyone uncomfortable, explains everything here on Earth, and you can’t disprove it."

Fortunately, to paraphrase Gauss, I am able to think of an indefinite number of theories guaranteed to enrage and which are invulnerable to falsification. More flamebait!

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 06, 2007 16:28 EST | Permalink | comments |
flamebait

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Homo Busianus: Creepy Guy Who Makes No Sense About Some Topic He Sees You Engaged In

About an hour after I got home, I went out to the store. The moment I walk in the door, a voice greets me:

"Weren't you on the bus? The bus reading Hofstadter?"

Very creepy, considering that I don't even notice my fellow passengers, much less what they're doing, unless they are unusually disfigured and/or outwardly insane.

While walking through the aisles he assailed me with oddly disjointed assertions having vaguely to do with GEB. "The mantissa... finite, you see? Can't be infinite!" "How each string... each proposition is unique. Unique like gematria!"

I tried my damnedest to find a method to his madness, for we all know how mathematicians are. Failing to find any, I threw an orange at him and made my escape.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 06, 2007 16:05 EST | Permalink | comments |
life

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Woo Hoo! Books!

I got:

Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach

Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics

David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer's Hard SF Renaissance

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 06, 2007 03:13 EST | Permalink | comments |
books

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Culinary Evolution

Around 2:30 a.m., I realized I hadn't eaten today. I glanced through my stock of spaghetti and thought, "why not try something different?"

As I was reaching for the mustard and curry powder, it hit me. Bachelors eat the most outlandish food because of Lamarckian memetic evolution. Memes evolve in Lamarkian time, orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution. This is why you are unable to understand what teenagers are saying. Set adrift, memes will evolve into monstrosities aeons before the platypus grows wings.

It would take a married couple decades before getting used to a late-night egg and hotdog omelette with a side of jalapeno peppers and wasabi. A bachelor, on the other hand, will arrive at this point about a week after shaking garlic powder on his ice-cream. And that point is only a matter of days from a casual experimentation with Worcestershire sauce and pepperoni soup.

We bachelors don't have the culinary tastes of madmen just for the hell of it. We've simply undergone rapid memetic speciation as a result of geographic isolation. Our tastes have evolved orders of magnitude more quickly than the rest of the population: we are the Galapagos finches that just happen to live on an island full of radioactive waste.

Update: Instead of Mustard Spaghetti, I chose to prepare a classy meal of Pepperoni Egg Noodles with Mango Chutney Sauce, But Since I Have No Mango Chutney I Improvised Using a Crushed Mango, Balsamic Vinegar, Curry Powder, Fried Green Peppers, and Finely Diced Habaneros.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 06, 2007 01:57 EST | Permalink | comments (2) |
life, blog nocturne

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In Which I List the Things I am Working on as of the Moment I Began Writing This Post

A quick scan through my Emacs buffers reveals, in no particular order:

A perl script that reads from the event log file of a security program, extracts IP's of pingers, outputs them to be used by a remote IP-anonymized shell script with a fondness of ping -f.

A perl script that scans C/C++ source files for keywords such as cin, cout, open(), etc, and inserts proper #include lines. Removes unneeded #includes as well.

A Lisp program that writes a Perl script that writes the original Lisp program.

A C++ program that converts arrays of MxN dimensions to MxN+1 length null-terminated ternary strings for transformations of point constellations.

A perl C++-to-LOLCODE translator.

A Scheme program that implements Malbolge's crazy operation.

Notes for an idea I had for making a tone-based programming language by building drivers for a guitar tuner. Hexadecimal base?

Scatlog, a programming language I'm writing in C. Looks like a bebop scat solo (inspired by Moo)

There. My coffee is done, and back to programming.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 04, 2007 21:58 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery, hackery

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Quechup My Ass

The Flying Space Monkey spammed the crap out of people on his Gmail address book by signing up with Quechup. The damned fool saw the page that explicitly says its going to scan your address book when it asks for your email password. And yet he stumbled on. Be more paranoid, man! They really are out to get you, sometimes!

I got another Quechup spam today from a Lynn Thomas. Here is my response:

Sorry, the Flying Space Monkey got to me already with that. You and he should have already known: never, ever, ever, ever, ever give your password out. Never. Ever. Especially when the page *explicitly* says it's going to scan your address book.

Damn. Quechep works better than a worm- it takes into account the reluctance of the average person to maintain minimum levels of paranoia. Please be more careful. First it's spamming the crap out of everyone you've ever sent mail to; next it's accidentally allowing some script kiddie access to your bank account.

By the way, I do not mean to reflect poorly on your intelligence. I merely point out that you did a very stupid thing for which you deserve at least a verbal bitchslap.

Good news, Quechup. My Spam Assassin program is almost complete. Soon, any spam I get is going to have the digital equivalent of a rabid doberman on their ass. Soon, very soon.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 04, 2007 19:06 EST | Permalink | comments |
hateblogging, spam horrors

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You've been awake programming way, way, too long...

When you suddenly wonder why Neo didn't just man the_one;bg rm -rf Agent_Smith_daemon;bg pkill -9 mAgentd;bg renice 19 Architect;bg rsync /Matrix/* /dev/remote_driveA; unzip & finger Trinity

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 03, 2007 04:24 EST | Permalink | comments |
life, geekery

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Nuke Mexico!

Mexican President Felipe Calderon said, "Mexico does not end at its borders."

Funny. If, say, Hu Jintao were to state similar internationalist feelings, our military would go very quickly into "monitor-for-suspicious-activity-and-nuke-instantly" mode. But alas, Mexico will not be nuked because its only dangerous possession is shitty water. Alert to any Mexicans reading this: I would say that your country is literally a cesspool, but to do so would dishonor the other pools full of rotten human waste.

Let's dissect Calderon's statement for kicks and giggles. The function of international borders is the delineation of the jurisdictions of national governments. A unilaterally assymetric border invariably exists when one nation invades another: one nation declares that its laws are now effective over the domain claimed by another nation. Historically, national leaders attempting invasion only declare assymetric border relationships with one or a few nations (almost always Poland). Calderon has asserted assymetric border relations with regard to every other country on earth. Calderon has therefore explicitly declared war upon every other nation on earth.

I will repeat: the President of Mexico has just made open war against every other nation. Mexico therefore represents a national security threat to every other nation, rivalling only Islamo-fascism in its ambitions.

We, and every other nation, have no choice but to declare Mexico in possession of water-bourne biological weapons and nuke the fuck out of it. We cannot sit back and allow Mexi-fascist splinter cells to infiltrate other nations. We cannot allow Mexi-fascism the time to physically invade Poland or slowly manipulate our civil liberties to impose upon us its culture. Mexico must be stopped. Now. Or before we know it, we will all be donning sombreros and taking siesta breaks once a day.

Update: Mischa also insults cesspools.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 02, 2007 21:33 EST | Permalink | comments |
news, satire, blog nocturne

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Just Another Perl Hacker Dissection

For the past couple days, I've been dissecting JAPHs (ok, so I can't make them yet).

Try it sometime. The key is first breaking it up into distinct lines, and then repeatedly banging your head against the desk until each line makes sense. Take, for instance, this simple JAPH by m0ve:

                        $_="What is this?"
                     ;my@t=unpack("C*",$_);my@
                   o;$o[0]=$t[0]-$t[12]+$t[9]-$t
                [6]+$t[2]+$t[9]-$t[10];$o[1]=$t[3]
             +$t[8]-$t[1]-$t[12]+$t[0]-$t[6]+$t[8]-$
            t[10];$o[2]=$t[12]+$t[7]+$t[8]-$t[9]-$t[10]
           +$t[3];$o[3]=$t[9]-$t[12]+$t[9]-$t[7]-$t[8]+
           $t[9];$o[4]=$t[8]-$t[0]+$t[6]-$t[10];$o[5]=$
            t[6];$o[6]=$t[7];$o[7]=$t[10]+$t[9]-$t[12]
            -$t[7]-$t[8]+$t[9];$o[8]=$t[5];$o[9]=$t[3
             ]+$t[8]-$t[12]-$t[0]+$t[4];$o[10]=$t[6];$
            o[11]=$t[3];$o[12]=$t[7];$o[13]=$t[0]-$t[
              12]-$t[6]+$t[2]+$t[10];$o[14]=$t[9]-$t
               [12]-$t[7]-$t[8]+$ t[9]+$t[9]+$t[9]
                    -$t[    12]-$t[7]-
                            $t[8]+$t[9           ];$
                            o[15]=$t[9         ]+$t[10]
                            -$t[12]-$t      [7]-$t[8]+$t
                            [9];$o[16]=$t[3]+$t[8]-$ t[11]
                            ;$o[17]=$t[6];$o[18]=
                            $t[9]-$t[12]-$t[7]-$t
                            [8]+$t[9]+$t[9]+$t[9
                            ]+$t[10]-$    t[12]-
                            $t[7]-$t[8    ];  $o
                            [19]=$t[2]    ;$  o[
20]=$t[3];$o[21]=$t[9]+$t[10]-$t[9];$o[22]=$t[0]-$t[12]-$t[6]+$t
[2]+$t[10];$o[23]=$t[0]-$t[12]+$t[9]-$t[6]+$t[2];print pack ("C*",@o);

Looks hard, doesn't it? Put it into standard format(manually if you aren't lazy enough to automate it):

$_="What is this?" ;
my@t=unpack("C*",$_);
my@o;
$o[0]=$t[0]-$t[12]+$t[9]-$t [6]+$t[2]+$t[9]-$t[10];
$o[1]=$t[3] +$t[8]-$t[1]-$t[12]+$t[0]-$t[6]+$t[8]-$ t[10];
$o[2]=$t[12]+$t[7]+$t[8]-$t[9]-$t[10] +$t[3];
$o[3]=$t[9]-$t[12]+$t[9]-$t[7]-$t[8]+ $t[9];
$o[4]=$t[8]-$t[0]+$t[6]-$t[10];
$o[5]=$t[6];
$o[6]=$t[7];
$o[7]=$t[10]+$t[9]-$t[12] -$t[7]-$t[8]+$t[9];
$o[8]=$t[5];
$o[9]=$t[3]+$t[8]-$t[12]-$t[0]+$t[4];
$o[10]=$t[6];
$o[11]=$t[3];
$o[12]=$t[7];
$o[13]=$t[0]-$t[12]-$t[6]+$t[2]+$t[10];
$o[14]=$t[9]-$t[12]-$t[7]-$t[8]+$ t[9]+$t[9]+$t[9] -$t[12]-$t[7]-$t[8]+$t[9 ];
$o[15]=$t[9]+$t[10] -$t[12]-$t[7]-$t[8]+$t[9];
$o[16]=$t[3]+$t[8]-$ t[11];
$o[17]=$t[6];
$o[18]=$t[9]-$t[12]-$t[7]-$t[8]+$t[9]+$t[9]+$t[9]+$t[10]-$t[12]-$t[7]-$t[8 ];
$o[19]=$t[2];
$o[20]=$t[3];
$o[21]=$t[9]+$t[10]-$t[9];
$o[22]=$t[0]-$t[12]-$t[6]+$t[2]+$t[10];
$o[23]=$t[0]-$t[12]+$t[9]-$t[6]+$t[2];
print pack ("C*",@o);

Now it should immediately make sense. All you really need to know is that @ signals an array, C* signals to the pack/unpack function that the unsigned byte value is to be read as a character, and basic array notation. Of course, for every JAPH this easy, there are 2⁴⁵ JAPHs that will make your eyes bleed.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 02, 2007 14:46 EST | Permalink | comments |
geekery, hackery

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New Chickens and Old

I knew this guy in high school. Man, this picture brings back memories of him drawing chickens molesting people. On other people's essays. In crayon. Moments before being handed in.

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 02, 2007 10:50 EST | Permalink | comments |
discoveries

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One of those days...

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 02, 2007 06:09 EST | Permalink | comments |
humor

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Evolution of a Blogger, 1

I've been blogging for a couple years now. I've evolved from an amoeba to a primate, devolved to a rodent, and am now hovering around Pugnacious Pug. I've risen to relative fame and fallen into obscurity that rivals Shakespeare's Lost Years. I've blogged huge essays and mundane idiocies, been at the pulse of memes and wandered from the memetic oasis. I've felt the heady rush of digital revolution, and the somber writer's block as I on more than one occasion resurrected my site. I've helped father some blogs, and I've helped drive a couple bloggers psychotic. I've bared my soul to faceless strangers and mocked their nude souls. Here are my lessons.

A couple years ago, I was constantly posting links to bizarre news. Not so much anymore. Experience has taught me what I like to call the Moore-Adams theory of bizarre news: given any event of weirdness N, in 18 months there will arise an event of weirdness N². He who chooses the left-hand path of excited postings about goat marriages and headless frogs, will be inevitably trumped by lady Reality sooner rather than later. Face it: you are going up against the Creator of the platypus. Do you really think you've come anywhere near the pinnacle of the bizarre?

It is said that you like someone for their best qualities, and love them for those traits that make you pound your head against a wall. It took me a long time to realize the same goes for rants and fiskings. The best fiskings I've read were by bloggers who let down their Cato masks and showed their readers their souls. Look through your blogroll and pick out the best ranters, and I'll bet they are precisely the ones whose children's birthdays you remember and whose jobs you commiserate with. Rick Moran, Graumagus, Jeff Goldstein, and Mischa are beloved only partially because of their bulldog wits and tenacious grasp of the absurd. It'll take the average blogger years of effort to balance those qualities that these guys effortlessly juggle. Take a look at Pastorius' latest posts and you'll see what I mean.

Every blogger at some point realizes that other people are actually reading his blog, and this usually leads to self-conscious posts: strained humor and pretentious words. Look at Gleenwald. The best bloggers are the ones who, like familiar friends, feel comfortable interrupting an intellectual conversation with a statement like, "that llama? I'd tap that." Check me if you don't believe me.

To be continued...

Posted by: Tom "The Pooklekufr" Treloar at September 01, 2007 03:42 EST | Permalink | comments |
blogging, blog nocturne

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