The Ladies Chained

Graduation Requirements

A few hours ago a student whose senior project I’m supervising (read: I yell at her whenever she unintentionally makes things explode or destroys the county’s power grid) saw a bunch of large, long, empty boxes in the back of the auditorium. She started talking about how they would lead themselves to great organizational systems for gels for stage lights and started dreaming about how she would make dividers and other wonderful knick-knacks for this marvelous system. Then she dropped down to earth and started talking about her lack or time and motivation and started doubting her crazy idea.

So I told her that turning these boxes into a storage system is now part of her project and thus part of her graduation requirement.

Like I saw her, she grabbed one of the huge boxes and ran away towards the light board in the back.

God Hates The World

A friend recently sent me a link to a YouTube video of God Hates The World, a song about how God hates the world and everything in it. This is not a joke. This is not satire. It is in fact a song about how God hates us all and everything will burn as written and performed by members of the Westboro Baptist Church.

My thoughts about this:

1. That soloist is rather bad.
2. The flag they are insulting is… Canadian?
3. I’m pretty sure they can do better with the arranging.
4. Wait a second. There’s already a much, much, much better song about God burning sinners.
5. They’re not even using a real piano!!!

Hot Girl Graph Theory

Via Reddit, here is a video segment of some Japanese people testing an algorithm for finding the most attractive female in Italy. They first find a random woman on the street and ask her to introduce them to her most attractive female friend. Then they ask said friend to introduce them to her most attractive female friend. And so on. I’m not clear when this algorithm terminates because I don’t know Japanese.

Even if women can be put into an objective total order this is a horrible algorithm. It’s very easy to see that it doesn’t always reach the maximal element in an arbitrary set of women. (Quick counterexample: start with the third most attractive woman, who know the second and fourth most attractive women; the second most attractive woman does not, however, know the most attractive one. Quicker counterexample: a disconnected set where the most attractive woman has no friends.) And you’re not guareenteed to “go up the ladder” at every step, since the most attractive woman than a woman knows may be herself! In fact, because of this, this algorithm never terminates and goes into an infinite loop even if it finds the most attractive woman in a set.

And besides, even if you find her, hot girl probability theory dictates that she’s already taken.

Concerning SquarO

Through a link on Reddit I found a game called SquarO. The game gives you a square grid with numbers in each square. The number tells you how many black vertices the square has. The goal of the game is to color in the vertices/lattice-points of the grid so that each square has the correct number of black vertices. It’s like a reverse Minesweeper. The “official rules” are here.

The rules page says that each of the grids in the game has a unique solution. This is obviously not true for any randomly generated grid with arbituary numbers placed in the squares. For a grid with multiple solutions, just place a 1 in all the squares. For a grid with no solutions, put a 1 in every square except for one, and put a 0 in that square. Since the game has hundreds of different puzzles I’d assume that they have a way of checking whether a grid has a unique solution. It could just be a brute force algorithm; the game doesn’t seem to generate these grids on-the-fly as they are numbered, so whoever designed the grids don’t have to check for a unique solution very quickly.

Calculus Based Web Host

I came back home from the Western Mass Sacred Harp Convention (possibly more on that later) to discover that this blog was completely down. Turns out my web host got its power shut off intentionally and unexpectedly; as you can probably see they just brought everything back up running.

Before they died, though, I actually wanted to post about their new pricing scheme. Before, they charged $1 for every GB of bandwidth used. Now, the more bandwidth is used the less they charge per GB. More precisely, the price per GB is based on a logarithmic scale. Even more precisely,

I am now officially buying bandwidth from a webhost that requires me to evaluate an integral numerically to figure out my bill.

Numbers and Multiplication (Chinese Edition)

Via God Plays Dice, an article from The New Yorker talks about how people remember and use numbers. The bit that I find most interesting is on the last page.

Because Chinese number words are so brief—they take less than a quarter of a second to say, on average, compared with a third of a second for English—the average Chinese speaker has a memory span of nine digits, versus seven digits for English speakers. (Speakers of the marvellously efficient Cantonese dialect, common in Hong Kong, can juggle ten digits in active memory.)

What the author neglect to mention is that in Chinese, not only are number words shorter, but they have the same number of syllables. That is the most important thing to me when memorizing digits. It is awkward saying “seven” next to “four” and “nine”. In Mandarin Chinese, and even moreso in Cantonese, all the number words are exactly one-syllable. This creates a nice one-to-one correspondence between syllables and digits.

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