Previously I mentioned that Mudders had fun putting Mudd at #1 on VSPink.com, followed by spelling WIBSTER (loosely the Mudd equivalent of IHTFP). If you go there now, the top 25 no longer contains any Ws. It does, however, spell: Harvey Mudd rocks boo Cal Tech. (Using Cal Tech as the C, no less).
While it seems a little less than first-rate to keep perpetuating a one-sided rivalry, that is pretty cool.
Mudders not only stuff Victoria's proverbial ballot box, they also made slots 2–7 spell WIBSTR (it's a Mudd thing described in the following article). Awesome.
I got a new computer. It's a little smaller and plenty quiet: a Dell Inspiron 530 w/ Intel® Core 2 Duo Processor E4600 (2MB L2 Cache,2.4GHz,800 FSB), Genuine Windows Vista® Home Basic Service Pack 1 Ubuntu for $597.44 after S&H. So far so good.
Also, I got new glasses. No pictures yet, but it's amazing what ten degrees of rotation of −2.75-diopter astigmatism does for image quality.
On the topic of optometry (and as seen on /.) ancient proverb say: Man who fall in vat of molten optical glass: make spectacle of self.
The 17th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony is Thursday October 4th at Harvard. We are considering going. Is anyone else interested? I'm interested in scaring up a Mudd Delegation (which we'd need to register by September 21).
Discussing physics at the bar the other day, I realized that Aristotle was right: heavy things hit the ground first, even in a vacuum.
Nonsense, you say, F=ma.
Consider this: On Earth, let a feather drop a meter in a vacuum; it falls 1 meter, accelerating at 9.8 m/s2. Now let a dump truck drop a meter in a vacuum; it again falls essentially 1 meter, again accelerating at 9.8 m/s2. But now clone the Earth and put the clone 1 meter above the ground (again in a vacuum). Now let go1. The clone accelerates at 9.8 m/s2, but only travels 0.5 meters because Earth accelerates toward it, also at 9.8 m/s2.
You've heard him: the one voice of NPR that never gets any credit, that of Frank Tavares, the one who reads the ad copy. Because “Support for NPR comes from...” isn't read by a computer.
Tavares became “the voice” in 1982 when NPR began using funding credits during programs. At the time, Tavares was director of specialized audience programming for NPR and executive producer for a number of programs that came through that service.
Finally, today I got a satisfying answer to a question I asked in 10th grade, ten years ago. We were learning about derivatives and I found it unsatisfying that the derivative of |x| was simply “undefined” at x=0. At the time, I felt like it should be 0 or something – certainly the line y=0 is tangent to |x|. Today in functional analysis, the professor got to talking about subderivatives, which basically captures my dissatisfaction. The idea with a subderivative is that you define the subderivative of a function at a point, x, to be the set of all slopes such that a line with such a slope intersecting ƒ at ƒ(x) does not cross ƒ in a neighborhood of that point. So the subderivative of y=x for x>0 is just {1}, but the subderivative of y=|x| is the closed interval [−1, 1] at the point x=0.
This is useful when you are trying to find the minimum of a function for which the minimum point has an undefined derivative. While the derivative is undefined (and so will be missed by looking for zeros in the derivative), the subderivative at that point will contain 0, which is what you are really worried about.
On my way home I was walking down a flight of outdoor steps while on the phone with mew0422. I noticed a garter snake on a step in front of me. My attempts at SoaP jokes failed until mew0422 pointed out that it was actually a snake on a plane – a snake on R2.
In case it wasn't already clear, mew0422 is awesome.
ACME Klein Bottle – because you can never have too many links to ACME Klein Bottle, because it's what you get when you cut a hole in two real projective planes and glue them together, and because you could put a snake in on one.
Some addenda from the trip: I went to Carmen at the Santa Fe Opera on Wednesday night. I hadn't been to an opera before although I've been to zillions of operettas. It was enjoyable. There's something great about a opera-style music to accompany a tragedy, especially when much of the show is really fairly upbeat.
One of the famous pieces from Carmen was used in a McDonald's Pizza commercial a while ago “It's a pizza happy meal, with pepperoni and cheese...”. In retrospect, using a song from a French tragic opera set in Spain to sell Americanized Italian food at a burger joint is a bit odd. The song sounds Italian enough to my ears, so who am I to judge?
The theater is beautiful. It is covered but the side walls and backdrop are open to the New Mexico sunset; the show began just after sundown. The theater has running subtitles rather than the traditional supertitles. The technology was originated at the Santa Fe Opera and uses back-lit LCD screens behind the seat in front of you. You can also see Spanish subtitles or turn them off entirely. (According to a radio interview I heard with someone at the SFO, about 10% of attendees watch in Spanish.)
On the topic of subtitles, I attended the fine film Snakes on a Plane. You may have heard of it. It features snakes. On a plane. As my schedule turned out, I saw an under-publicized showing with open captions. As Wikipedia was quick to inform me, open means “always on” whereas “closed caption” means you push a button to turn it on. The difference between “captions” and “titles” is that subtitles are for speakers of another language and so will translate on-screen text as well; captions are for the hard of hearing and don't repeat on-screen text but do describe significant sounds. In the case of SoaP, this was only a plus. For example: “[moaning]”.
The SFO show was preceded by a beautiful sunset which my camera phone tried desperately to capture:
Found at Starbucks in Albuquerque:
On the flight back, apparently the new security restrictions are producing more checked luggage so the friendly Southwest flight crew at Midway finished prep before the ground crew loaded all the luggage. What's an impatient pilot and flight attendant to do but go throw luggage on the plane?
This past weekend I went with my family to Mass MoCA. As a modern art museum, a lot of it was totally crazy, but some was amazingly cool. My favorite was a U-shaped table filled with jars of very odd personal things – scraps of fabric, photos, pins, toenail clippings, etc. The instructions: “Please Organize”. Peggy Diggs's "Recollection 2" at Mass MoCA
It was interesting to consider my initial responses of primary variable on which to sort. I was going by material, but I also liked a collection of things related to the death of a father. Of course, we didn't have an infinite-dimensional table, so you had to consider what attributes of random things you found most important. It was also interesting in the way Wikipedia is in that it invites passerbys to add information to a system. I didn't see any vandals, but in this case, would a vandal really be an artist in that they would be the ones changing the rules?
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benfrantzdale's journal
