Thane Plambeck

Hacked by Chinese!

definition

Rigatoni vs Penne

Gloria suggested that I combine the contents of two pasta boxes, each 1/4 full, to save space in the pantry.

So—was it to be rigatoni posing as penne, or the reverse?

Let's say you're looking for rigatoni, and you find penne in the box. If you're like me, you would think:

"Ah—here's something interesting—there's penne here, not rigatoni!"

But if you're looking for penne, and find rigatoni, that's different:

"OK, who's the idiot who put the rigatoni in here?"

I decided to pour the penne into the rigatoni.

"Excuse me, may I have your seat?"

NYT article on a Milgram experiment:

Dr. Milgram, who died in 1984 at age 51, got the idea for the experiment from a conversation with his mother-in-law, who complained to him one day that no one had offered her a seat on the subway. "It occurred to me: What would have happened had she asked for a seat?" he said in a 1974 interview in the magazine Psychology Today.

He suggested the experiment to one of his graduate student classes, but the students recoiled. Finally, one student, Ira Goodman, volunteered to try it with a partner. But instead of coming back after 20 trials as he had promised, he returned with only 14. When Dr. Milgram asked him what had happened, he said that it was just too difficult.

Dismissing his students' fears, Dr. Milgram set out to try it himself. But when he approached his first seated passenger, he found himself frozen.

"The words seemed lodged in my trachea and would simply not emerge," he said in the interview.

Retreating, he berated himself: 'What kind of craven coward are you?"

A few unsuccessful tries later, he managed to choke out a request.

"Taking the man's seat, I was overwhelmed by the need to behave in a way that would justify my request," he said. "My head sank between my knees, and I could feel my face blanching. I was not role-playing. I actually felt as if I were going to perish."

Defending the quadratic

British Parliamentary debate on quadratic equations and why they are important (via Henry Baker).

An excerpt:

I put this matter on the agenda today because I have been troubled since the president of a teachers' union suggested a couple of months ago that mathematics might be dropped as a compulsory subject by pupils at the age of 14. Mr. Bladen of the National Association of Schoolmasters and Union of Women Teachers was given a lengthy slot on the "Today" programme to present his views. He cited the quadratic equation as an example of the sort of irrelevant topic that pupils study. I had hoped that the Government would make a robust rebuttal, but there was no defence either of mathematics in general or the quadratic equation in particular...

Chrestomathy

definition

Hostess Twinkies Sushi

recipe

The Sound Cannon

Interesting photos of the LRAD acoustical weapon being pointed at protestors in NYC.

From one news story (my bold marks added):

The resulting ultrasonic sound wave can then be directed out in a tightly controlled beam. Wherever the beam makes contact with air, the air molecules interact in a way that isolates the original audible sound. So if you're standing in front of the ultrasonic sound wave, you can hear the sound. If you're a few inches away, you hear nothing.

This cuts down on ambient noise and gives listeners the somewhat eerie effect that the noise is inside their heads.

"We like to say we create silence instead of noise," said Norris. "You don't need to fill the space with a whole cacophony of noise."

Why al-Qaeda is Winning

Pepe Escobar

Unleashed

Drudge seems to take particular delight in combing the AP for bad photos of Democratic politicians. It's hard work, since most of the funny looking guys are Republican. But Al Gore sure doesn't look too healthy in this one. He looks like he's gained perhaps 100 lbs in four years. A little too much pasta primavera? From the AP article:

Al Gore's stiff jokes are gone now, replaced by recount jokes. The cautious campaigner of 2000 is gone, too, replaced by a fire-breathing Bush basher.

When Gore delivered his latest-in-a-series slam at the Republicans last week, faulting Vice President Dick Cheney for "sleazy and despicable" criticism of the Democrats, a White House spokesman dismissively responded: "Consider the source."

Well, Gore used to be the vice president. And, as he likes to say, he used to be the next president of the United States.

Now, he is Al Gore, private citizen—unleashed.

Goya

Los Caprichos

they go plucked amazon

From the archives: pleasevote.com

Walking to the Sky

Photo: Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

"Walking to the Sky," a new sculpture by Jonathan Borofsky, recently installed at Rockefeller Center.

Richard Forno

Weapons of Mass Delusion

Lizzo

Lizzo put up a web site with some of her landscapes. Marc helped.

Schubert Dance

This Schubert Dance (Op 33, D. 783, No. 10), available in the Dover book "Schubert Dances," seems to be suitable for endless improvisation.

You could play it with ice tongs and it would still sound good.

Playing through these, I started putting smiley faces by the ones I liked immediately or thought otherwise admirable in some way. About a year later Cole asked, "Why do they all have smiley faces?"

I said, they don't; just the ones I like. But then he challenged me to find one that didn't have the smiley. Not so easy.

From the archives (Jan 2002): I tried to compose a Schubert Waltz.

Specialist sought

I spent all day TeXing a big stack of labor day weekend scribblings on wild misere games and semigroup presentations. I only got through about half it. It gave me a sore neck.

I need a chiropractor, or perhaps only some consulting time with someone who understands ideal extensions. Is there a semigroup theorist in the house?

This is from a 2002 paper Semigroups: Past, Present and Future, by John Howie:

In 1952, in the Preface to the second edition of The Theory of Groups, A. G. Kurosh [14] wrote:

The concept of the factor group and the homomorphism theorem appear in the book long before the concept of a normal subgroup is introduced. This interchange is not due to the needs of group theory itself and has been made only in order to expose the triviality of those all-too-numerous generalizations of the group concept whose theory does not go much further than the homomorphism theorem.

Once in a while that is quoted to me by group theorists as an argument against studying semigroup theory. It may be an argument against studying some other algebras, but I hope today to convince anyone who needs convincing that Kurosh, if he did have semigroup theory in mind, was wrong, even in 1952. Maybe he had an excuse for being wrong: it would be surprising if he had not known of the work of Suskevic [28] in 1928, in which the structure of what we now call completely simple semigroups was elucidated, but I suppose that the cataclysm of the Second World War followed by the tragedy of the Cold War might have left him unaware of more recent developments.

What is meant by good mathematics? If you take the view that "good" can apply only to mathematics that is directly applicable to physics or engineering or whatever, then I suggest that you leave quietly now. I am speaking to those who, like me, regard Andrew Wiles as one of the heroes of the late twentieth century, despite the fact that the truth of Fermat's theorem is, so far as we know, irrelevant to the building of bridges, the design of computers or the classification of elementary particles.

Louis Armstrong

I'll be glad when you're dead you rascal you

ALL-ONE! ALL-ONE!

From a Dr Bronner's Magic Soaps label [PDF]:

Rinse towel in plain hot water and massage again. Breathe deeply! Health is Wealth. Within 9 minutes you feel fresh, mint-clean, saving 90% of your hot water & soap, ready to help teach the whole Human race the Moral ABC of All-One-God-Faith! For we're All-One or none! ALL-ONE! ALL-ONE!

Biotch vs Biotech

Biotch vs Biotech.

Derf (neilfred picciotto) calls this photo a "found deletion (well, insertion, actually)."

[via: puzzlers.org].

Banff International Research Station

A combinatorial games conference I'm sure I'll attend next summer. Inshallah.

I like the idea of an "International Research Station." It makes me think of an outpost on the South Pole, or on a moon of Saturn perhaps.

Today in the Safeway parking lot, I saw a car with a simple bumper sticker reading "Blame Canada."

For what?

Palm Leaf Hat Size

Since the label just fell out of my Palm Leaf hat, I thought I'd better save it for future reference.