jason - Network

Ooh, look at this rabbit hole! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legendary_creatures_by_typeI had a quick look at mammals (aquatic)...

Ooh, look at this rabbit hole!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legendary_creatures_by_type

I had a quick look at mammals (aquatic) and I see that the Scottish have no fewer than five different types of malevolent aquatic horse spirit!

I have a movie recommendation: Hundreds of Beavers (2022). Mixed live action / animation / fursuits, slapstick, lots of death and poop, a...

I have a movie recommendation: Hundreds of Beavers (2022). Mixed live action / animation / fursuits, slapstick, lots of death and poop, a little sex. B&W, essentially no speech. About Wisconsin.

DID YOU KNOW that there is a sort of long-division-esque way of calculating square roots? I remember when I was 10 or 11 my maternal...

DID YOU KNOW that there is a sort of long-division-esque way of calculating square roots? I remember when I was 10 or 11 my maternal grandfather showed me this, I was amazed.

(Unlike long division, where each additional digit of accuracy in the answer requires the same amount of effort, in this method each additional digit requires linearly more effort, so the 20th digit requires 5 times as much effort as the 4th digit.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4D5bPqONAE

If my name was Deb, I would make my developer handle "technical deb", if developers had developer handles.

If my name was Deb, I would make my developer handle "technical deb", if developers had developer handles.

Woo, power's back on after 9 hours! Thanks SDG&E! Apparently the problem was that SDG&E's equipment failed because it...

Woo, power's back on after 9 hours! Thanks SDG&E! Apparently the problem was that SDG&E's equipment failed because it rained. Nobody could have predicted liquid, falling out of the sky, onto their equipment - that's just crazy!

I remember encountering this thin gold foil on Indian food that you could eat, supposedly it was good for the digestion. So can I also just...

I remember encountering this thin gold foil on Indian food that you could eat, supposedly it was good for the digestion.

So can I also just eat the foil off this Modelo?

Instead of sleeping I was wondering about cardinal and ordinal numbers. Why do cardinal numbers share a name with a red bird we mostly...

Instead of sleeping I was wondering about cardinal and ordinal numbers. Why do cardinal numbers share a name with a red bird we mostly don't get in California? The bird is named after the office in the Catholic Church, whose holders dress all in red (like Cardinal Richelieu, or Michael Palin in the Spanish Inquisition sketch). Cardinals wear read because of their willingness to shed their blood in defense of the Church; or else as a symbol of the blood of Christ; or else because the Romans placed a scarlet robe on Jesus when he was about to be executed (scarlet according to Matthew but purple according to several other gospels); or, originally, just to distinguish them from lesser priests. The word "cardinal" derives from the Latin for "hinge-like", and basically means "central" or "important", like when something hinges on something else. The cardinal numbers are just "the numbers", one, two, three, etc. They're the important central ones.

Ordinal numbers express order, first second third etc. The etymology is fairly obvious. But why do we use ordinal numbers for fractions (kinda mostly, except for first and second and fourth vs whole and half and quarter)? It turns out a lot of languages, and almost all Romance languages, do the same. "A third" comes from "a third part", but why is THAT ordinal? The best explanation I could find from 10 minutes of googling was that you cut the thing into three parts and then take the last one, that's a third part. Seems fishy. But, that's etymology for you.

uspol, light mathSo, about 40,000 federal workers took Trump/Musk's buyout offer, which says more-or-less "if you agree to resign...

uspol, light math

So, about 40,000 federal workers took Trump/Musk's buyout offer, which says more-or-less "if you agree to resign on September 30, you can do no work at full salary* from home til then." That's 8.25 months from when the letter was sent. There are about 2.3 million federal full-time workers total. Let's say they work for 45 years on average. That means about ((8.25 / 12) / 45) * 2.3 million of them, or about 40,000, are within 8.25 months of retirement right now.

Interesting how those two numbers are the same.

I assumed a steady size of the federal workforce which is of course not exact.

* - the text of the OPM email doesn't guarantee no work, although it says you will "likely" have reduced or no work and guarantees exemption from the return-to-office mandate

Lifehack: when I have empty coke cans but I don't want to reach all the way to the trash to throw them out, but I DO want to be able to...

Lifehack: when I have empty coke cans but I don't want to reach all the way to the trash to throw them out, but I DO want to be able to tell which of the myriad still have coke in them: I stack the empties in a tower. Because I surely wouldn't have stacked full ones in a tower; the one not in the tower must still have coke in it.

Today I realized that rational numbers aren't rational-meaning-sensible, they're rational-meaning-a-ratio (of integers).

Today I realized that rational numbers aren't rational-meaning-sensible, they're rational-meaning-a-ratio (of integers).

I'm reading Mr. Midshipman Easy by Marryat, a fine earlier adventure tale in the line of the Hornblower books and, I suppose, Patrick...

I'm reading Mr. Midshipman Easy by Marryat, a fine earlier adventure tale in the line of the Hornblower books and, I suppose, Patrick O'Brian. It's pretty fun. It has an amazing literary device that I've never seen before and must have dropped out of favor sometime in the last 200 years: in the middle of Chapter 21, the author just leaves off telling the story, and starts talking instead about how great his other books are and implying you should maybe buy some of those as well. After a few pages of this he gets back to the story. I hate ads with a deep and irrational passion but this was surprisingly ok, even delightful.

There should be a widespread undergrad CS class on writing social media scrapers. It would keep the social media companies busy writing...

There should be a widespread undergrad CS class on writing social media scrapers. It would keep the social media companies busy writing scraper blockers, and it would be really good practice for the students. They might even come up with something useful - a Facebook scraper that just clicked on all of my friends and loaded anything new from their personal feed once an hour or so could be the basis for a really great Facebook.

We recently watched In The Heart of the Sea on Netflix, which was fun. Thor, Spiderman / Mad-Eye Moody, and Gil-Galad go a-whaling but end...

We recently watched In The Heart of the Sea on Netflix, which was fun. Thor, Spiderman / Mad-Eye Moody, and Gil-Galad go a-whaling but end up eating each other. Not in the fun porno sense neither. Based (very closely, it turns out) on a true story! So this led me to read up on the delicate question; and that led to this excellent poem, by W. S. Gilbert of -and-Sullivan fame:
https://victorianweb.org/mt/gilbert/yarn.html

Tesla's FSD demonstrates it knows how to hide a body -...

Tesla's FSD demonstrates it knows how to hide a body - https://patch.com/california/missionviejo/bodies-2-men-found-submerged-tesla-below-i-5-laguna-niguel

That was an "oomph" !, not a "factorial" !

That was an "oomph" !, not a "factorial" !

Just in time, I realized that 2025 is a 1-2-3-4-5 year, in that it can be written as a straightforward formula using exactly those five...

Just in time, I realized that 2025 is a 1-2-3-4-5 year, in that it can be written as a straightforward formula using exactly those five single-digit numbers (1*(3^4)*(5^2))! This no doubt means something.

When's the next time that Friday the Thirteenth falls on a Friday?

News media, you disappoint me.There are a bunch of articles out there reporting on a finding in a PNAS paper that barn owls'...

News media, you disappoint me.

There are a bunch of articles out there reporting on a finding in a PNAS paper that barn owls' seemingly-conspicuous bright white coloration helps them hunt on moonlit nights because rodents can't distinguish them from the moon.

And not one of them was titled "That's No Moon."

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2406808121

12+1 = 11+212+1 is an anagram of 11+2"twelve plus one" is an anagram of "eleven plus two"Are there any other sets of...

12+1 = 11+2
12+1 is an anagram of 11+2
"twelve plus one" is an anagram of "eleven plus two"

Are there any other sets of numbers where this holds? Or even where the left-hand-side is equal to the right-hand-side, and is also an anagram of it when written out in words?

A little inspection shows there must be infinitely many such pairs, because you can add e.g. "one hundred and" to both sides etc. But also there are a bunch of different base sets using tricks like "thirty two plus forty" and moving the two, i.e. just word rearrangements.

Are there any with a different operation, for example plus on one side and minus on the other?

Well there can't be a plus and a minus, because there's no written-out manageable number where you can get the 'p' or 'm' (you could get an 'm' from 'million' and 'p' from 'septillion') and I suspect if you start bringing in stuff like 'pi' it is hopeless to get the math to work out. Unless, 'e to the i pi'?

There could potentially be one with 'minus' and 'times', though.

It occurred to me that Xero Dei would be a good name for a group of hackers in a story-or-game-or-something I was writing. But surely...

It occurred to me that Xero Dei would be a good name for a group of hackers in a story-or-game-or-something I was writing. But surely somebody had already thought of this? Well, Google didn't turn up anything but there is an accounting cloud services company in New Zealand called Xero and they have a DEI department which is OBVIOUSLY A COVER FOR A GROUP OF HACKERS. Duh. Where is a better place to hide than pretending to be the DEI department of a boring cloud services accounting firm!?

What the US needs is a year of mandatory public service at age 18, and the public service you do is always babysitting.

What the US needs is a year of mandatory public service at age 18, and the public service you do is always babysitting.