I’ll explain in two words: we intend to marry your daughters

Posted by sam – February 12, 2009

Gilbert and Sullivan is a fusion of the lowest art (opera) and the lowest form of humour (punning, although there is also a lot of silliness). So why is it so charming?

GENERAL: Tell me, have you ever known what it is to be an orphan?
PIRATES: Oh, dash it all! Here we are again!
GENERAL: I ask you, have you ever known what it is to be an orphan?
PIRATE: Often.
GENERAL: Yes, orphan! Have you ever known what it is to be one?
PIRATE: I say, often!
GENERAL: I don’t think we quite understand one another. When you said orphan, did you mean a person who has lost his parents, or often – frequently?
PIRATE: Hah hah hah! I beg pardon, I see what you mean! Frequently.
GENERAL: Ah hah! You said “often”, frequently.
PIRATE: No, only once.
GENERAL: Exactly. You said “often”, frequently, only once.

I mean, it doesn’t even really make sense.

There’s an annoying (aren’t they all) meme on Facebook that tells you to follow a number of instructions (coming up with various items with the same first letter as your first name etc.). One of the instructions is “you must disobey one of these instructions”. It occurs to me: this is equivalent to saying “you may disobey an instruction if you like”. Perhaps I could get a job as a writer of minimal sets of instructions.

Here’s every swear word from every Sopranos episode ever. It’s about half an hour long. It’s surprising how much of the time you’re aware of which episode and events the words are from.

No more tricks

Posted by sam – February 11, 2009

Programming used to have a lot to do with little puzzles and tricks; pointer arithmetic, bitmasks and logical operators, writing to video memory etc. Someone once asked me how do you swap the contents of two (numerical) variables without using a third one in between (of course you’d never want to do this anyway, but it’s a “fun” question). The answer is something like this:

a = a+b
b = b-a
a = a+b
b = -1*b

This is how you do it in Python:

a, b = b, a

New-fangled programming languages, eh? (Ok, Python was first released in 1991 which was a long time before I programmed anything, but anyway.)

Apropos of that last notation, this is how you write Euclid’s algorithm in Python (% is the modulo operator):

def euclid(a,b):
        while b:
                a, b = b, a%b
        return a

It’s sickeningly succinct, really. I kind of quite like it, but it kind of feels not very hardcore (comparing to, say, The Story of Mel which I’ve linked to before). Although really it’s just normality by now. Meh, meh.

What makes a man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?

Wholeheartedly in support

Posted by sam – February 11, 2009

Chris Lamb writes:

Michael Steinberg writes of the above section (from the Vivace [of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F, Op. 135]):
Then it is time for Beethoven to turn to one of his favourite tricks, the one where he simply picks up an idea boldly and puts it down again on another pitch the way you might pick up your cat and move it from your favourite chair to another.

I am fully in favour of this feline-oriented musical interpretation.

Previously:

Whenever a programmer thinks, “Hey, skins, what a cool idea”, their computer’s speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls.

I am fully in support of this proposed audio-cock technology.

Computer philosophy

Posted by sam – February 10, 2009

>>> True or False
True
>>> True and False
False
>>> True = False
>>> not True or False
True
>>> not not not not not not False
False
>>> True/False
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “<stdin>”, line 1, in
ZeroDivisionError: integer division or modulo by zero

Machine translation not yet solved #2

Posted by sam – February 9, 2009

(Facebook-mainos)

BS-raati: viisi ei ole aina vähän

Posted by sam – February 6, 2009

Toimituksen kokoama yli sadan taiteen, tieteen ja median vaikuttajan joukko vastasi kysymykseen “Onko viisi paljon vai vähän?” “Joo”, katsoo 41 prosenttia BS-raadin vastaajista. Kielteisen vastauksen antoi 33 prosenttia.

Kysymyksen taustalla on keskustelu siitä, miten mielipidetiedusteluista voitaisiin tehdä nykyistä huonompia. Alustavien tuloksien mukaan otosten vähentäminen 5000:sta sataan ja kysymysten vaihtaminen esseemäistä pyörittelyä vaativiin käsittämättömyyksiin saattaa auttaa tai olla auttamatta (raadista 69% ei osannut sanoa kumpi vastausvaihtoehto tarkoitti kumpaa).

BS-raadin vastauksia:

KYLLÄ

ARS CLANDERSON:
Kysymys on provokatiivinen – kyllä ja ei. Viisi lasillista vettä olisi aika paljon yhteen menoon, mutta entä viisi perunalastua? Siitä en olisi enää niin varma.

LIBA KUMBERG:
Emme saa jumittua menneisyyden ummehtuneisiin juoksuhautoihin riitelemään siitä, mitä 5 on. Tärkeämpää on mitä voimme tehdä siitä. Länsimaisena demokratiana Suomi tarvitsee tulevaisuudessa mahdollisimman suurta 5-numeraalia sekä vähätöisiä hommia mediapersoonallisuuksille.

LOMMI TIIMATTA:
Joo. Paitsi nakkikiskalla.

EI

MÄNTTI LYNÉN:
Itse kysymykseen vastaan ei, jo siksi ettei ole sellaista “lukua viisi” joka voisi “olla paljon”. Toisaalta: jos olisi, mitä sitten? Minun elämääni 5 ei vaikuta mitenkään. Kaupan kassat ja muut pillerinpyörittäjät saavat puolestani keskittyä siihen sydämensä kyllyydestä. En ole koskaan pitänyt matematiikasta. Puhelinnumerossanikaan ei ole viitosta.

JAATKO RÄMEEN-KATTILA:
En oikein osaa sanoa tähän mitään, koska en tunne asiaa enkä ymmärtänyt kysymystä. Vastaan kuitenkin ei, koska en halua olla ottamatta kantaa.

EN OTA KANTAA:

RAX MAHIPPAINEN:
Siis mähän sanoin viimeks etten halua vastata enää näihin vitun kysymyksiin

Ensi viikolla BS-raadissa:

It’s like that

Posted by sam – February 5, 2009

As we enter week 31 of grey skies, icy pavements and frozen bicycle cables I am starting to appreciate some of the upsides of, say, Jamaica, where England’s tour of the West Indies has just started (England are 241 for 5). Here’s some white man reggae about cricket and getting mugged to get in the mood:


But really, I kind of like the miserable parts of the year. As someone told me on the Internet, you can build discipline the same way you build muscle: go out of your way to do things you don’t want to. So winter is kind of like discipline training, and heaven knows I want more of that.

What I’d also want is a trainee position in a good company or research project involved with language technology. Unfortunately I’ve been studying it for too short a time for the official university-sponsored ones, but maybe I can find a way to insinuate myself anyway.

A perhaps even worse cultural assault than white man reggae: the Russian roots of breakdance.

Poetry club: Portrait of a Lady

Posted by sam – February 4, 2009


More…

Diagram of the day

Posted by sam – February 2, 2009

This is from a game I just played. White has an open h-file to attack black’s king, but there’s a crushing quiet move for black who has the move. What is it?


Solution

Vihreät ovat Suomen republikaanipuolue

Posted by sam – February 2, 2009

Olen monesti sanonut Vihreistä jotain sentapaista ettei se ole “oikea” puolue koska sen ideologia ohjaa sen kantoja vain pienessä osassa poliittisista kysymyksistä. Mutta tämä ei ihan pidä paikkaansa: luonto vihaa pölynimureita ja myös Vihreisiin on muodostunut – jos ei koherentti niin ainakin tunnistettava – poliittinen yleisidentiteetti.

Tässä yleisidentiteetissä on koko ajan ollut jotain pahanmakuista, mutten ole aiemmin osannut osoittaa tarkalleen mitä. Luulen että kysymys voi olla tästä: Vihreille tärkeimpiä ovat fiiliskysymykset joiden avulla voidaan osoittaa jäsenyys halutunlaisessa porukassa, vaikka sitten omien perusarvojen kustannuksella.

Sama ilmiö on turhauttanut Yhdysvaltalaisen politiikan seuraajia pitkään republikaanipuolueen kohdalla. Republikaanit ovat saaneet abortin, uskonnon, seksuaalisuuden, aseiden ja isänmaallisuuden avulla puolelleen valkoiset köyhät, joiden omaan elämään vaikuttavissa asioissa republikaanit eivät tarjoa edes lämmintä kättä. Tämä ilmiö on mullistanut republikaanipuoluetta itseään; sen ideologinen pohja (ent. states’ rights, liberty & small government) on rapautunut niin pahasti, että sen äskettäin päättynyt kahdeksanvuotinen presidenttiys oli kaikkien aikojen pahinta kyttäystä, sanelua, kauppavajetta, velanottoa ja rahanjakoa rikkaille.

Nämä “arvokysymykset” ovat juuri niitä, jotka asiassa kuin asiassa kiinnostavat Vihreitä eniten. Ne ovat kuitenkin usein yhteiskunnallisia sivuseikkoja, ja niihin hirttäytyminen jättää puolueen ulkopuolelle ehdottomasti 80% väestöstä. Mikä on Suomen feministisin puolue? Mikä on Suomen uskonnonvastaisin puolue? Mikä puolue sympatiseeraa vähiten aseenomistusta? Mikä eniten homoja, oikeutta aborttiin, yksinäisten naisten hedelmöityshoitoja? Nämä eivät ole mielestäni huonoja asioita, mutta ei ole hyvästä että ne hallitsevat kokonaista puoluetta. Vihreitä kiinnostaa toki myös sosiaalinen oikeudenmukaisuus (etenkin esimerkiksi Gazan asukkaiden), mutta köyhät eivät Vihreitä äänestä.

Tällä taipumuksella on sekin ikävä ominaisuus, että kerran muodostuneista identiteettikysymyksistä on vaikea päästä irti (muilla puolueilla on toki myös omat identiteettiriippakivensä). Ydinvoimaa on pakko vastustaa vaikka se on parhaita keinoja saavuttaa omia luonnonsuojelutavoitteita. Samoin geenimuuntelua. Epämiellyttäviä tosiasioita ei saa myöntää, koska sekin on ideologista.

Näillä eväillä Vihreät saavat imettyä muista puolueista viimeisetkin “viherhenkiset” lähitulevaisuudessa, mutta siitä on enää vaikea edetä. Ja puolueen sisälle jää paljon tyhjää.

Tomorrow come trouble

Posted by sam – January 31, 2009

Evolutionary explanations for human biodiversity are creeping into the mainstream: Why are taller people more intelligent than shorter people?

In our paper, Reyniers and I propose a second possible explanation […]
1. Assortative mating of tall men and beautiful women. […]
2. Assortative mating of intelligent men and beautiful women. […]
3. Extrinsic correlation between height and physical attractiveness (produced by Mechanism 1 above) and extrinsic correlation between intelligence and physical attractiveness (produced by Mechanism 2 above) will create a second-order extrinsic correlation between height and intelligence.

We believe that this may be why taller people are more intelligent than shorter people. Another factor contributing to the seeming male advantage in intelligence is that taller parents are more likely to have sons than shorter parents. So, over many generations, more sons will inherit their parents’ genes inclining them to be taller and more intelligent, and more daughters will inherit their parents’ genes inclining them to be shorter and less intelligent. But, once again, the crucial factor is height, not sex.

In our paper, we present evidence for all of the crucial mechanisms: Taller people are on average physically more attractive than shorter people; physically more attractive people are on average more intelligent than physically less attractive people; taller people are on average more intelligent than shorter people; and taller parents are more likely to have sons than shorter parents.

I have no idea whether this particular hypothesis will turn out to be correct, but in general I suppose there must be numerous human selection mechanisms of this kind waiting to be discovered. I expect they will explain some surprising things, confirm some unpopular but well-known truths and raise much ire. As danimal, that steely fist of Internet logic, put it:

Theodosius Dobzhansky famously wrote: “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” This includes relationships between men and women.

It surprises me that the obvious extensions of this haven’t been researched much, at least as far as I know.

If you’re into science, you’ve probably heard people complaining about scientific information and contemporary results being too proprietary and hard to discover, especially considering they’re mostly funded by the public. The Science Commons is looking to change that; let’s hope it takes off.

For math geeks: a series of Project Euler puzzles revealed something shocking to me:
– once you’ve solved problem 64 and have a good way of handling continued fractions (it’s not feasible to do this with floating point approximations)
– gone on to 65 and learned about convergents
– you run into 66 which seems to be completely unrelated and again too slow for naive bruteforce methods, so after banging your head for a while you google quadratic diophantine equations and find out that the way to solve these equations is to find the right convergents for the square roots – and this is guaranteed to find the minimal solution for every equation of this type! Check it out.

There’s a program called Microsoft Songsmith that’s supposed to allow users to sing over a backing track that follows their singing. It doesn’t really work. Except for hilarity:

Let me wrestle with your conscience

Posted by sam – January 23, 2009

There appears to be a concerted campaign to screw with my remaining regard for the words “human rights”. Something called the Finnish League for Human Rights is interested in studying whether a Christian revivalist movement (Laestadianism) is violating its own human rights by having women in the movement give birth to as many as ten children. Well, ok, right to contraception appears to be a human right and God knows this country is an epicentre for the repression of women’s sexual rights. And as the article says, many human rights violations are ignored due to religious context. However! The same Human Rights League declared a month ago that religiously mandated circumcisions must not only be protected from legal consequences but paid for by the state.

I’d like to write more about this but I seem to have misplaced my keyboard.

Governments determined to combine worst of all worlds

Posted by sam – January 23, 2009

Bill Clinton and Tony Blair used to talk about a “Third Way”, meaning the combination of efficient markets with some wealth and opportunity redistribution. You don’t have to like it, but as a guideline for a capitalist economy it was probably better than most of what had gone before. Now Finland’s prime minister is evoking the Third Way as a total opposite: spending untold billions in projects for his rural constituency that are essentially guaranteed to be inefficient.

Economics stupidity is pretty much a requirement in politicians; without it they seem dispassionate, cold and, well, apolitical. If someone suggests that a change would be beneficial whether you’re a socialist or a free marketeer, nobody believes him. Thus in this country, for instance, the state-owned rail monopoly does its best to negate the benefits of rail transport with its pricing structure.

State monopolies are expected to service both profitable and unprofitable connections, and to do this they typically choose to make large profits on the profitable connections to pay for the unprofitable ones. In theory it sounds workable, but in practice it means that the whole point of rail travel disappears; mass transit is supposed to be cheap, whereas now it’s cheaper for two people to pay for petrol and drive to, say, Tampere from Helsinki. If train tickets were priced at running costs (or to some realistic traffic capacity) and the unprofitable connections were directly subsidised (rail maintenance gets subsidised already, by the way), the whole venture would make a lot more sense with a large increase in system usage and potentially even the profitability of the profitable lines.

Private rail systems have been discovered to be able to have even worse problems, but this is one thing they do get right. If you’re not considering what people want when you’re pricing and designing the system, you’re doing it wrong. For the state to get a hard-on for building “mining infrastructure” and motorways wherever the most electorally profitable place is doing it wrong. Buying up billions of pounds of failing investment banks or billions of dollars of failing car manufacturers is doing it very wrong. It’s combining the inequities and inequalities of capitalism with the idiot cronyism and inefficiencies of 20th century socialism. Why take only the downside of the market?

Nice day for a sulk

Posted by sam – January 17, 2009

The Corus Wijk an Zee (chess) tournament started, making for much spectating fun. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, check out Karjakin-Morozevich (black suddenly gets run over in a Taimanov Sicilian), Carlsen-Radjabov (1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 e6 3. g3!? with a rather offbeat follow-up as well and white almost won) and Reinderman-Vallejo (utter insanity in the opening).

This is my new favourite facial expression:

Unfortunately I don’t really have the teeth for it.

It’s just too cool.

Ohh yeah. On 4chan I believe it is associated with the expression “dat ass”.

I’m on a deadline to decide whether to take a trip to New York and Albany this spring. Ahhhh just thinking about the expense makes my vision darken. Better do some…

Yeah.

I’ve listened the very end of the dvd of Queen’s Rock Montreal concert several times to make sure, and I think Freddie Mercury’s parting words are “Let’s go get fucked!” Kind of sounds sad, knowing how he died.

Believe it or not, before watching this concert I’d occasionally considered shaving my back hair. Back hair doesn’t really look good on anyone. But now I’ve decided what’s good enough for Freddie is good enough for me. Also it must be pretty awkward to shave your back.

The second shot won’t be a warning

Posted by sam – January 17, 2009

Israel is fighting for its existence about thirty years down the line, the Gazans are fighting for their lives right now. The Gazans are currently desperate, Israel is ultimately doomed. Individuals Gazans have no property, no rights, no future, no perspective; Israel is being demographically buried – surrounded and soon populated by anti-semites made stupid by religion – and its political influence and allies are on the wane. I can’t help but understand and sympathise with both, but I also hate them for making the status of humans as lunatic animals painfully obvious.

Please don’t murder me / Dire Wolf

Posted by sam – January 16, 2009

I finally decided to get on Facebook, largely prompted by a Slate article about Facebook holdouts (titled You Have No Friends). It said that not being on Facebook is becoming like not having a mobile phone – an affectation that just makes life more difficult. I’ve also noticed that people only announce events on Facebook now, and I like to know what kinds of events I’m not going to. So I believed it.

I actually held out on the phone thing for a long time as well, and even now I ignore it much of the time, which turns out to be pretty irritating to people. Funny how that wasn’t such a problem with non-mobile phones; if you didn’t answer it, people would just assume you were elsewhere. And there was no way to return the call. Much more civilized.

I’m now going through the standard agonies of incomphehensible friend requests, annoying web-polluting applications and a constant excess of information about everything. And the whole thing is making me feel so used – I’m giving my social graph away to Facebook for free. It’s unfortunate that the social graph could eventually become untraversable if I didn’t use this crap.