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Jul. 13th, 2008 @ 01:14 am Meta-quiz Meme
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Related to several places, most recently stolen from God Plays Dice here, from a book. The point being not what people know, but how good they are at knowing what they know.

"For each of the following ten questions, give a range that you are 90 percent confident contains the correct answer. Your goal is to get exactly nine of these right[1]. Yes, I know that sounds weird! But the point is that if you get all ten right, you're proabably underestimating your own abilities to predict things. If you get eight or less, you're probably overestimating them."

Assign a range to each question in a comment. Look up the answers and see how many you got right. Post it if you like. GodPlaysDice said to repost it if you liked, and to email him the answers (izzycat AT gmail DOT com) if you like; I assume he wishes to informally gauge something.

Here are the questions:
1. How old was Martin Luther King, Jr. at death?
2. What is the length of the Nile River?
3. How many countries belong to OPEC?
4. How many books are there in the Old Testament?
5. What is the diameter of the moon?
6. What is the weight of an empty Boeing 747-400?
7. In what year was Mozart born?
8. What is the gestation period of an Asian elephant?
9. What is the air distance from London to Tokyo?
10. What is the depth of the deepest known point in the ocean?

Although what interested me was that it simply meant you could have a quiz where people who don't know much about it (or who know too much about it) can play too. I'm curious to see how big the ranges are -- mine are embarrassingly wide, generally between a factor of two to a factor of ten, though of course, I know several much more precisely now.

[1] It would be more precise to say "and not know which one you got wrong". The idea being you should be pretty certain about all of them, not guess "0-1000,000" on nine and "-315.17" on the last one :)
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Jul. 1st, 2008 @ 11:27 pm Advance Cycle Boxes
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Just before traffic lights, there is a cycle-lane like box the width of the main lane, in which cyclists can stop at lights without being rear-ended by cars.

0. Is there an official name for them? "Advance cycle box" is in my head, is is equally likely to be something else entirely, or made up.

1. What is the intended use if the cyclist approaches the traffic lights behind three cars? I feel it should be obvious what they're supposed to do, but admit I can't tell. Obviously if you can accelerate briskly to 20mph, there's no problem, but if you can't, or don't want to?

Undertake if there is a clear cycle lane, else wait in the queue? Always undertake if you can? (But it's not clear when the highway code permits undertaking.) Overtake if you can? (But this is unlikely to be possible.) Always wait? (But that leaves a frustrated driver behind you.) Dismount and cross the intersection from the pavement? (But that's annoying and takes several times as long.)

2. If it were safe to do either, which would delay the drivers least: moving ahead to the cycle box, or waiting in turn. One way, the drivers ahead go past, but the one behind probably misses the lights. The other, all the drivers are delayed until the road is wide enough to overtake safely again.

3. What do you do?

I feel silly for not knowing, but most of the time, it doesn't come up, either because there's not enough of a queue, or the road is wide enough to permit cars overtaking cycles safely. And then when it does, I don't actually know.
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May. 30th, 2008 @ 02:22 pm Pronouns
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"When John was a woman, [he/she/they] said '...' " Which pronoun do you prefer? (That is, "he" is appropriate for John now, "she" would be appropriate for what John was then, and "they" would specify the ambiguity.)

"The things God or Jesus [was/were] recorded as saying are ..." Which pronoun do you prefer? (That is, do you treat them as two separate people (were)? Or one person (was)? :))

Obviously both are arbitrary, and I think both sufficiently specialised that most people wouldn't mind which you used, I just wondered if anyone had a strong opinion :)
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May. 12th, 2008 @ 04:31 pm Innmoot or Tomb of Horrors
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Poll #1186584 Tuesday night
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Tuesday night:

View Answers

Go to Cambridge Tolkien Society innmoot[1]
4 (66.7%)

Go back to roleplaying group (whcih was a lovely group, but I eventually decided I didn't have time to stay for) to play Tomb of Horrors
2 (33.3%)


[1] "pub meet". Yes, that is a reference to tolkien, but it's also a perfectly natural derivation from the english words "inn" and "moot".
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May. 6th, 2008 @ 03:50 pm Question of Evil
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If you were the God, and all possible parallel universes existed side-by-side, what would you do? Would you delete most, or transform them into copies of the one where people were happiest? Or let them run?

To me, that thought experiment relates to several questions:

* The problem of evil "If God existed, and were omnipotent and good, why would he let there be bad things". If you can even conceive of God not reordering all his universes to be "best", that is one possible answer to the question. (Not that I think that's true, but it's possibly a rebuttal to the argument that "There are bad things, therefore God is at most two of good, omnipotent, and existing")

* A logical extension of local morality. People naturally care more for people close to them (both friends, and people similar to them, and people physically closer to them). To a greater or lesser extent depending on circumstance. This has bad effects, that far away tragedies can get ignored, but good effects, that people can choose to help some people close to them, even if this is a drop in the ocean compared to everything else, but a lot better than just freezing up. But if all possible parallel universes existed, it would make it obvious how every thing you chose to do was an essentially arbitrary decision about how people close to you matter more than everyone else,
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haylp/wacky races
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May. 1st, 2008 @ 09:50 am UNIT
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Would procedures would you follow as UNIT (special alien hunting army task force) to avoid having people get nobbled? If you pretend you might at any moment meet a shape-changer, or a mind-dominating effect, what could you do to try to decrease the single-point-of-failure-ness[1]?

Eg. Passwords and things don't work against telepaths, but do against shape-changers. They have to simple enough to remember under fire, and complex enough that you can't find the right challenge simply by walking up to one guy, seeing what he says, eating his face, and saying that to everyone else.

Eg. You need to be especially careful of top brass with lots of authority.

Eg. If you can manage any surveillance, say guards carrying real-time video uplinks, that's probably good, so you can see when they go offline or meet something dangerous and die without reporting. But you must be careful not to rely on this so much you're in trouble when it's subverted.

[1] Of course, an organised opponent could probably still do something, it might even be a plan for interesting watching, if they first must find a weak spot where people are sloppy, lure someone away to create a single point of failure, and then take over the remainer quickly.
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Apr. 30th, 2008 @ 08:10 pm cartesian-heights.org
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How about cartesian-heights.org? It's distinctive, it's a nice name, it looks fairly easy to type.

Are hyphens sane in domain names? I know many sites automatically reject[1] any email address with a "+" in, is a "-" likely to be a problem?

If you saw it, would you remember if it had a hyphen, dot, underscore or nothing between the words? If I said "cartesian heights dot org with a hyphen" would you understand it?

Are you familiar enough with the adjective "cartesian" to be able to remember it if you hadn't heard it before?

[1] See standard "why go to such an effort to make life more difficult for people?" rant
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haylp/wacky races
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Apr. 16th, 2008 @ 07:28 pm Carlton?
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Should I stay in, have dinner, watch angel, tidy up for guest tomorrow, and spod about surreal numbers, their use in defining fixed rules to let "pick a number" include infinity in magc: the gathering and other board games, and whether there is or is not any subtle sexism in Knuth's dialogues about them?

Or go to the Carlton, have ravioli, and wave at people pre-quiz, including Pippa who I rarely see? (I probably won't have the tuits to stay and quiz.)

PS. R. will hopefully meet me in the Carlton tomorrow, if anyone is curious to meet.
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Apr. 9th, 2008 @ 07:43 pm What is usenet for databases?
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Recently my "books lent and borrowed" list ballooned by 100% or more, and it occurred to me how useful this would be if it were stored in a simple database, so "Jack, friend, lent/borrowed, book" would automatically contribute to friend's list as well. (You might make a few tweaks on a server large enough that everyone doesn't automatically trust each other such as recording if both people have approved the entry.) And if it's returned, either of us can check it off.

Obviously someone used to web programming could knock up something that works in a simple way in an evening if they put their mind to it (though I'm rather rusty myself).

However, this is obviously limited by server. Someone would write it and host it on chiark, or other server, and invite people to use it, but if someone elsewhere did the same thing, you'd have to have an account on both if you had friends on both. (Which isn't a big deal for _this_, but I'm curious, and would be great for many applications, maybe even social networking ones.)

What is the most obvious way of letting the two (or many) servers cooperate? Tim described this as "usenet for databases". Mobbsy said the nearest thing that sprang to mind was DNS, which do trade information back and forth. You might find the bandwidth wasn't even that high -- eg. many web apps send email alerts anyway, so the extra hit of sending the data to another server mightn't be so much extra.

( footnotes )
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haylp/wacky races
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Apr. 8th, 2008 @ 02:29 am (no subject)
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Ewx's recently made a poll on "number of sexual partners". The graph appeared rather like a poisson distribution[1] but it's hard to actually deduce anything for sure as (a) rounding to the nearest 3 obscures the first part of the hump and (b) most things look vaguely like a poisson anyway.

Statistics is hard. I know a little about the most common distributions, but not really what happens when you start combining them.

The sum of two poisson random variables (even with different means) is another poisson random variable. So I hypothesised that the the number of sexual partners a person has would be a poisson distribution -- if you assume each year they have a poisson-distributed number of partners (eg. mean 1/20 for someone in a stable relationship, 100 for someone very promiscuous), and those means are fixed in advance, it seems the sum to any point in their life will be a poisson.

However, Question 1 is, "What if those means aren't fixed in advance?" Is there a convenient distribution on some appropriate assumptions, or is it just hard?

Question 2 is, supposing each person were a poisson distribution, with means were distributed in a certain way (say, normal distribution), does that give any coherent distribution when you count the number of different people with a number of partners?

Question 3 is, is there any data on this, from Kinsey or anywhere? A cursory search didn't show it. What should ewx's poll show? A hump at 0 and 1? A poisson? Might people's means cluster, if you classed people into different categories, might you see several overlayed poisson curves?

[1] Poisson distribution is what lots of discrete things end up as. If you have a very large binomial distribution, eg. toss 1000 coins with 1/1000 chance of coming up heads, it strarts to look like a poisson. Although what it really measures is when the "time until the next event" is random, ie. exponentially decays.
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miss_next introspection cartesian daemon
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Mar. 28th, 2008 @ 12:22 am Follow-up: Hume's Law
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I'm very interested to see the responses to people having heard of Hume's Fork. It came to mind because it was an implicit assumption in some witterings about truth I had a while back, but the comments made me think it wasn't as necessarily as clear cut as it had sounded.

And then lately, I was fascinated to came across the description on wikipedia covering approximately exactly what I'd wondered myself, and couldn't decide to be annoyed that I should obviously have done some more reading on what philosophers had already thought about before thinking myself, or pleased that I came up with/synthesised from current culture the same ideas and that they were hence obviously relevant.

However, what I meant to ask about but failed was Hume's Law. Can anyone oblige with another poll "Have you heard of Hume's Law?". Thank you! Answers might be "Heard of it", "Heard of the concept but didn't know the name" and "not specifically heard of the concept but it sounds obvious"
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Mar. 26th, 2008 @ 01:15 am (no subject)
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This weekend has no fixed plans. Feeling quite happy, I can do what I like. Should I:

* Go to london, see the zoo?
* Go to london, see the gallery?
* Write a short story about a murder in a fictional pantheon?
* Write lots of emails to livredor?
* Curl up in public somewhere and read for a day?
* Write some code for something simple but potentially useful?
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Mar. 21st, 2008 @ 08:59 am Travel to Eastercon
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Travel is all sorted, I'm about to be off. There's not even any need to catch a particular train, I just go to the station and catch the next train to king's X, thenceto tube. I have an oystercard (thanks livredor), an improved route (thanks Ian, who gave me the keywords to look up on tfl) and an unshakeable faith that it'll be easy (thanks fivemack).

The journey back is the same, except that Easter Monday London->Cambridge trains have a bus replacement from Royston. Liz is cunningly getting a very cheap hotel near the con, which would suit well as you can leave the last-night party, sleep, and commute to cam first thing tuesday, but I did not decide to go to eastercon early enough to conjure this sort of plan.

I don't know whether to try to find somewhere in London to stop Monday night, but will work it out later.

(And I'll be boycotting for the rest of the day, due to not being here.)
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Mar. 10th, 2008 @ 12:42 pm (no subject)
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By the way, does anyone recommend any pubs for dinner in outlying villages from Cambridge? We're going out for the day and hope to stop somewhere on the way back. I seem to recall somewhere in particular being mentioned as somewhere you should try to go, but not which. But anywhere you've been would be fine.

(I'll probably be able to check email on the way back, but you can text me on 07733208255 if you prefer. Thank you!)
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Feb. 22nd, 2008 @ 11:14 am Italics
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I'm fairly sure I use bold, italic and *starred* in subtly different ways. I'm often fascinated by such subtle distinctions, such as the subtleties in translating into one of two related words.

The thing is, I can't put my finger on what the differences might be. (The nearest I've come is in observed starring can star two consecutive words separately, or as part of a phrase, which is occasionally useful.) Does anyone recognise a difference in themselves?

I was reminded of this by the idea in html that you have a semantic tag, eg. em for emphasis, and a mapping from that to display, where the mapping could be overridden. Which is definitely the right way, but not yet universal. And part of the reason I'm slow in adopting is that having acquired subtle differences, I don't like losing them, even if it would make sense. After all, if I can't explain them, I can't persuade anyone to make a tag for them :)

A tag for citation, a common usage of italic, makes sense, as often that is represented in a specific way on different web-pages, or in different ways in a piece of text, (eg. in theory, nested cite tags might helpfully do different things). And I can certainly live with only one form of textual emphasis, I use none at all in formal writing. But I don't like to :) And I have a nagging feeling that if I write em, then someone who hasn't configured their web browser might see it as bold[1], and think I was shouting, whereas I'd only meant italic, and it's quite different :)

[1] That is a difference, that bold stands out of the page a lot more, whereas italic doesn't. So both serve some function. I am confused with google chat because it renders starred text as bold, and I use stars both for actions (*hug*) which should be bold and emphasis (I *did* say that) which shouldn't, at least in my writing :)
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Feb. 6th, 2008 @ 10:15 am Is it moral to click on web ads over curiosity?
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Is it moral to click on web ads over curiosity? OK, it matters very little. But what is right? It's most honest to, if you see the link, click on it. However if you just want to laugh at their name, if it's a click-through ad, you're costing them money. Would it be better if only people interested clicked through, and you copied the address manually? On the other hand, presumably they want as many people as possible to see their web site, so you should click to show their ad did in fact interest you. I guess it depends which half of the process they're working on -- is their website a good sell but they want more people to see it, or do lots of people see it but they want more people who are actually interested?

This musing occurred to me after seeing some really quite amusing entitled google ads:

* "Afgan Poetry"
* "Join the Fake Society" ["The society for societies" No idea what it actually is, though]
* "Six Thinking Hats Course" [Depressingly, some sort of business awareness technique]
* "How to kiss a girl"
* "101 Cookbooks, a Twist on Guacamole."
* "Does 1+1=3?"
* "The atheist's riddle: cosmicfingerprints.com" [The riddle is: DNA is a language. All (other) languages are invented by a Mind. Then why isn't DNA invented by a mind?]
* "MCSE Boot Camp £3995."
* "2,000 DVDs for only 35p." That's a pretty good deal, even just for filler. Imagine, for 35p, you could wallpaper your room.
* "Emo goths -- Date emo goths" [Seriously wtf?]
* "Female Cougars: www.DateACougar.com" [Seriously, what the fucking fuck? A closer examination, however, reveals that cougars are a sort of woman. In fact, both this and the previous one look very suspicious, more like a front page than a site really for goths.]
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Dec. 28th, 2007 @ 12:51 am (no subject)
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My nascest beard is about three weeks old now. I've had mixed responses.

* Normally whenever anyone changes in appearance, even a haircut or wearing different sorts of clothes, no-one they meet can resist pointing and dropping jaws in shock. I'm very impressed that everyone, friends and family, didn't.
* There were a few guardedly optimistic responses
* There were a few shocked negative responses, though the shock may be from the change, rather than the negative.
* If any of the poleaxed people want to put some tactful words to their reaction, I'm listening, and appreciate the honest feedback :)
* We had a play with the camera, but didn't get any nice pictures yet. I might as well let it fill in as much as possible before admitting it online :)
* I rather like it. I think it *does* make me look distinguished. Of course, it's something like being a ukulele-master, being good at something ridiculous rather than average at something normal, may or may not be desirable. I certainly don't care if I'm fashionable, on the other hand, I certainly care what people I like think.
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Dec. 13th, 2007 @ 02:20 pm (no subject)
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Skiing nuns is:

[ ] A Christian Christmas card or
[ ] A secular Christmas card?
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Dec. 11th, 2007 @ 06:57 pm (no subject)
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Apparently, Desmond Morris proposes that men are gay when they fail to leave the "boys together" phase of development.

The articles read like odes to the "make plausible declarative statements telling stories about what might happen in [field of "soft" science] and pretend the fact that the conclusions accord with reality is evidence for the stories".

The comments are full of people objecting that what he says in no way accords with their experience.

My main reactions were to the first sentence, pointing out that by the theory of natural selection, heterosexual males are favoured by evolution. That this is so, I think *is* clear. And you can [edit:] tell this is the *only* case from evidence such as the extinction of honey bees (where all but one female bees in a hive are non-sexual) and the breeding out of sickle-cell anaemia (being a single-gene controlled contra-survival trait) in all of the human population.

And to the title. I don't know if male and female homosexuality are related or not. But an explanation that claims to explain one of them smacks of suspiciciosity to me.

I'm afraid I couldn't read further. Does anyone actually know any details? Presumably his book actually says something, you can't dismiss a theory based on its title, even if that would be fun :)
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Nov. 19th, 2007 @ 03:31 pm (no subject)
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Vulturific
Corvidaec

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