linux4all

ON this Friday,I’m feeling a little scattered, with a few random thoughts flitting about in my gray matter without much rhyme or reason to them. That may be because of the intense rush I was going through in all my spare time for the last several days trying to get a research paper ready for publication, only to get stuck on a couple of fine points that just didn’t feel ready yet. So, rather than publish something I’d feel was half-done, I’m taking a step back to catch my breath, look at it fresh again after the weekend,¹ and look on Monday for a new journal or conference to submit it to instead.

C’est la vie.

* * * * *

I was listening to YouTube videos of a PhD physicist (Dr. Blitz) debating against people who hold views contrary to demonstrable reality. Most of these are proponents of the idea that the Earth is flat, but there are others he’s engaged on other topics such as evolution, and the age of the Earth.

It’s somewhat frustrating to listen to some of the people arguing with him and their lack of ability to pose anything resembling a coherent point of view or to provide any evidence in support of their position that makes any sense. (I’m not necessarily even assuming here whether or not their position is correct or not,² just that the contingent of people who show up on his debate channel seem to be so woefully misinformed and lack any sense of how to make a logical argument or even have a modicum of rational, critical thinking about them.³

In the comment section I noticed someone had made a comment that summarized what it feels like to listen to many of these, in a way I hadn’t thought of but now that I’ve seen it, it makes perfect sense. “It’s like listening to a conversation where only one of the people is high.”

* * * * *

It occurred to me that I posted some of the questions that came up in my quiz show but never gave the answers. In case you’re curious, here they are.

(The Good AI for 100) To destroy The Good Place AI assistant, named Siri due to product placement, you hold her nose while inserting a paperclip into her left ear, reducing her to a marble which can be disposed of.
The AI assistant in the show is named Janet, not Siri.
(CS for 800) A toddler staring at cookies baking in an oven, constantly asking “Are they done yet?” is a real-world example of the Dining Philosophers Problem in Computer Science.
This is an example of one process blocked waiting for another to complete. However, while I might be tempted to name this “The Starving Toddler Problem,” it’s not an example of The Dining Philosophers Problem. That one is an illustration of a problem in Computer Science where multiple processes are mutually deadlocked, since they are waiting for each other before proceeding, so the whole operation is hopelessly stuck. By contrast, the toddler is just blocked waiting for the cookies but nothing’s preventing the cookies from eventually being done, at which point the toddler gets access to the resource they’re waiting for.⁴
(Potpourri for 100) Known for its ease of implementation and efficient run-time performance, Bubble Sort is taught to first-year CS students as a go-to sorting method due to its O(n) growth characteristic.
Bubble Sort is notoriously awful in terms of performance. It is taught to first-year students because it’s insanely easy to understand how it works and to run through the algorithm in your head. But it has a growth characteristic of O(n²), not O(n).⁵
(Conspiracies and Pseudoscience for 400) According to a 2020 survey conducted in Britain, one-third of those polled “could not rule out a link” between GPS satellites and the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, with some believing they were both part of a deliberate plot against the populace.
The people surveyed thought 5G cell towers and signals were to blame, not GPS.
(Hardware for 400) The first commercially-available personal computer, the Altair 8800, consisted only of a front panel of lights & switches, a 6502 CPU board, and a small RAM board.
The Altair 8800 was based on the Intel 8080A CPU, not the 6502.
(Mascots for 300) The public face of the OpenBSD operating system has been a spiky pufferfish named Buttercup, since version 2.7 of that OS.
The name of the pufferfish mascot is Puffy, not Buttercup.
(CTF for 200) Capture the Flag games have a long history in literature and film as a training exercise, as seen in the Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, and Divergent stories. (14981, 45294220909404522163130995)⁵
Harry Potter did not have a Capture the Flag game.
(CS for 600) After writing the first modern programming language compiler, Lady Ada Lovelace went on to help create the COBOL language which still powers much of the world’s business architecture today.
Lady Ada Lovelace made her contributions to Computer Science long before COBOL. That was invented by Grace Hopper.
(Fun & Games for 400) The Chinese game of Mahjong is similar to the card game of Rummy but is played with small tiles representing winds, dragons, flowers, and seasons, plus four suits (cups, wands, pentacles, and swords).
Mahjong’s tiles come in three suits: bamboo, characters, and dots (or coins). The four suits in the question are actually from Tarot cards.
(– for 200) In Python, if x=42, then after executing y = --x, both x and y have the value 41 since x is decremented first then the resulting value assigned to y.
The values of x and y will both be 42. Unlike C, the Python programming language does not have a “--” math operator, so “--x” is just two minus signs, making the value –(–(x)), which is just x.

* * * * *

That’s probably enough randomness from my brain for today.

… Nature almost surely operates by combining chance with necessity, randomness with determinism…
—Eric Chaisson
Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos

__________
¹I say “after the weekend” knowing full well I can’t leave it alone and will at least be re-running and analyzing my experimental data during the weekend anyway.
²Although in the case of the flat earthers… c’mon.
³I’m not criticizing anyone for not being an expert or well-grounded in logic. I’m talking about basic-level common sense here.
⁴The Dining Philosophers Problem illustrates this by saying there are four philosophers sitting around a table, each with a bowl of noodles in front of them. There are four chopsticks total, sitting between each of the philosophers. In order to eat, a philosopher must grab the chopstick on their left and then grab the one on their right, take a bite, and then put down both chopsticks. However, if through an unfortunate bit of timing, all four pick up the chopstick to their left, they are all stuck waiting for the one on their right to be set down. But that can never happen because they’re all being held by someone who’s waiting for yet another chopstick to be released before they let go of their own.
⁵This means that as the number of items to be sorted increases, the time needed to sort them increases proportional to the square of the number of items, so with any sizeable number of things to sort, Bubble Sort gets very quickly out of hand with how inefficient it is.

Current Mood: restless

cimorene

Recently I watched a random algorithm-suggested YouTube video about that DIY house from the SomethingAwful forums and it reminded me of a Folding Ideas video that talks about the child-obliterating zipline discussion, so I'm rewatching some old Folding Ideas videos (still can't remember which one did that and I haven't found it yet). Today I watched Folding Ideas | An American Tail: Fievel Goes to Video Game Hell (Oct 4, 2018) and came across this striking quote that articulates a lot of what I enjoy about reading bad and mediocre fanfiction.

I wanted to share this with you, not because it's important or good or an underrated gem, but because it's none of those things. This game is bad. It's cheaply made, it's difficult to find, it's largely forgotten, it's not fun, and for all those reasons, it's likely to vanish entirely. And that's why I wanted to preserve it.

I believe in the value of failed art. Art that is driven by carelessness, by unchecked and untalented ego, by spectacularly low-stakes greed. It has a tendency to be novel, to be unpredictable, in a way that deliberate art never can. This is why it's so much fun to watch bad movies.

No one would ever make this game on purpose. Something in the creative process needs to be fundamentally broken to get to this point.

If you were going to sit down two decades later to make a game out of An American Tail because you actually cared about the movie and you cared about making the game, you're not going to churn out a hodgepodge series of disconnected minigames that don't work well.

It is not simply a lack of time or money that produces something like An American Tail the video game, but a profound lack of caring.

The end product of that broken process isn't worth playing for its own merits, but it is worth playing because it's worth remembering.

Dan Olson, "Folding Ideas - An American Tail: Fievel Goes to Video Game Hell" (Oct 4, 2018)

Interestingly, the fact that it tends to be novel, unpredictable, and fun, in a way that is maybe like watching bad movies, remains true even though there are probably many more pieces of bad fanfiction that aren't driven by a profound lack of caring.

On one level, yes, there's an overwhelming carelessness in a lot of badfic and a lot of modern fanfiction in general - I've talked before about the changing norms around beta reading, then editing, then even spellcheck, so that now editing is vanishingly rare and an overwhelming majority of the works you see in the tags I've visited at AO3 in recent years - with the sole exception of Yuletide and other fests - are dominated by things that haven't even been spellchecked, and you're less likely to see betas thanked in the notes than to see a statement that they didn't bother to spellcheck, didn't have a beta, or will maybe proofread later but they couldn't proofread before posting because they just "had to" post from their phone on a train in a tunnel at 3 am to meet a nonexistent deadline. The current norms seem to be extremely casual, and to consider editing and spellcheck and even reading back over what you've written as a fussy optional bit of formality that isn't really needed on comfortable casual occasions like posting fic, but should be saved for very special events.

But on another, of course, fanfiction is not often produced with a complete lack of caring. There is at least an enthusiasm or interest, an effort, however small, involved in putting their ideas into words - even if they've just sort of farted out the initial form of the idea without engaging their internal filters at all, or posted a chat log and not bothered to take out the tags and add sentence-final punctuation to it, at least there was a mental spark behind it that is probably not present in the corporate greed and maze of underpaid subcontractors involved with cheap crap videogames.

In spite of the presence in most fanfiction (I say most because you will still run into things that are like 'this was actually written for my OCs and I've used find and replace with the pairing names from this list of five popular fandoms, you can read this same poorly-punctuated fart with the names from the other fandoms here!') of that animating spark, though, overall, surveying the field of badfic and, tbh, even most of the generically mediocre fanfiction that

waxjism would describe in her spreadsheet as "sub mid"... the vibes of what he's saying here hold true.

They do reek of an often fascinating level of not-caring, whether it's caring enough to use spellcheck or taking five seconds to google an incorrect fact they stuck in that they didn't have to put there in the first place. They do provide a fully perceptible class of novelty - random, bizarre innovations that it feels like nobody could have done "on purpose". They do remind you of very bad movies. And in many of them it does seem like something in the creative process had to be fundamentally broken (perhaps just the steps between the initial brainstorming and any analysis or consideration or planning).

vaxhacker

I did the movie quote meme the other day, and I traditionally do these two together, so here goes…. Again, this will be a mini version of the meme compared to previous years because of my serious lack of free time while getting a research paper written. Here’s how it works:

Think of a few books you love. I’ve always done 20 in the past, but I’m doing a smaller one this time.
Post a memorable quote from each one in your blog.
Let your friends have fun trying to guess the books.

I’ll post the answers to these in a few days. If you think you know any of them (and I’m sure you do), leave something in the comments below.

“That ship hated me.”
“Ship? What happened to it? Do you know?”
“It hated me because I talked to it.”
“You talked to it? What do you mean you talked to it?”
“Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself into its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the universe to it.”
“And what happened?”
“It committed suicide.”
“My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer and I have my mind… and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone if it is to keep its edge.”
“I’m your worst nightmare!” said Teatime cheerfully.
The man shuddered.
“You mean… the one with the giant cabbage and the sort of whirring knife thing?”
“Sorry?” Teatime looked momentarily nonplussed.
“Then you’re the one where I’m falling, only instead of the ground underneath it’s all—”
“No. In fact I’m—”
The guard sagged. “Awww, not the one where there’s all this kind of, you know, mud and then everything goes blue—”
“No, I’m—”
‘Oh, shit, then you’re the one where there’s this door only there’s no floor beyond it and then there’s these claws—”
“No,” said Teatime. “Not that one.” He withdrew a dagger from his sleeve. “I’m the one where this man comes out of nowhere and kills you, stone dead.”
Grinning is something you do when you are entertained in some way, such as reading a good book or watching someone you don’t care for spill orange soda all over himself.
Farewell sweet earth and northern sky,
for ever blest, since here did lie
and here with lissom limbs did run
beneath the Moon, beneath the Sun,
Lúthien Tinúviel
more fair than Mortal tongue can tell.
Though all to ruin fell the world
and were dissolved and backward hurled;
unmade into the old abyss,
yet were its making good, for this—
the dusk, the dawn, the earth, the sea—
that Lúthien for a time should be.
From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.
Saying that, he was suddenly himself again, despite his lunatic hair and eyes: a man whose personal dignity went so deep as to be nearly invisible…
It was more than dignity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved.
The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.
“Genius will only take you to ‘good.’ Practice will take you to ‘Master.’ ”
“Come you near or go you far, light from candle or flick’ring star? See what you will, or so you think, but is water sweet before you drink? Who can know of truth and lies? When can a man believe his eyes? Suspect what’s known to mortal senses, for our nature vaults all mystic fences, that stand between that which is and seems, and back we are to truth… or dreams.”
“He should not be here,” said the fish in the pot. “He should not be here when your mother is out.”
“It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever,” he said. “Have you thought of going into teaching?”
“Well, I’m back.”

Books are a uniquely portable magic.
—Stephen King

Current Mood: busy

vaxhacker

Peter Capaldi is such a brilliant actor, and his Doctor is such a wacky and wonderful character, I can’t wait to see what adventures are in store for him and Bill throughout time and space.
—Pearl Mackie

Current Mood: amused

vaxhacker

TODAY is the 11th of November. Veterans Day in my country, and other things elsewhere in the world, such as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day, as we commemorate the end of The Great War, nay, The War to End All Wars. (If only that were true. Hindsight can be painful sometimes.) It is good to pause and pay respect to those who made the ultimate sacrifice to bring an end to a war so devastating that we couldn’t—at least for a time—imagine humanity doing that to ourselves all over again.

Even though it seems to have baffled some of our dear leaders that we never celebrated Armistice Day like the rest of the world, they just aren’t apparently aware of our own history. We did. We just later (in the 1950s) expanded it to include all war veterans, and renamed it Veterans Day at that point.

But thinking of that got me wondering what else has happened or has been celebrated on this day. Thanks to Google and Wikipedia and various other infallible founts of knowledge and wisdom on the Internet, today I learned….

It’s apparently an unofficial holiday for single people in China.
The state of Washington was admitted to the Union in 1889 (Oregon chose to join the Union on Valentine’s Day, which is cooler).
In 1215 the doctrine of transubstantiation was codified officially.
Gemini 12 was launched in 1966, getting us one step closer to the moon.
Speaking of NASA, on this day in 1982 the first “real” space shuttle mission takes off (sorry, Enterprise, it should have been you instead of Columbia).
Demi Moore was born (1962), as was Leonardo DiCaprio (1974).
It’s also the date of a number of Christian feasts.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
—G.K. Chesterton

Randomness

The value of failed art

Book Quote Meme VI

Wordless Wednesday: Directions in the Cosmos

11/11

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