News You Can Bruise

Seth is talking about self-referential aptitude tests, so maybe it's time to tell the story of... the self-referential aptitude test that ripped me off (nb. change to "broke my heart" for inclusion in Readers Digest).

This was in seventh grade algebra. We were given a mimeographed worksheet containing a "test of [our] ability to follow instructions". It had twenty instructions on it to follow. It said "Read this test all the way through before you do anything." So I did. The first instruction said to put your name at the top of the paper. All the rest of the instructions were to write down the answer to various trivia questions, except the last one, which was along the lines of "Stop! Don't write anything on this paper! Just turn it in!"

Ridiculous, I thought. By the time I get to that instruction, I'll have already written all kinds of things on this paper, and there's nothing after it. It's probably a trick to get people to follow the instructions out of order. Anyway, having read the test all the way through, I started on the first instruction. I completed all the instructions until I got to the one that said stop, then I stopped and turned it in.

Well, that wasn't what you were supposed to do. You were supposed to execute the the last instruction before any of the others, and never write anything on your paper. Why should you execute instruction #20 before executing instruction #19? Because #20 looks weird! Geez, Leonard!

I fought it, and lost. At the time I foolishly thought that mine was the only correct solution. But I don't think the worksheet said anything about the order in which you should complete the instructions, so there are actually a large number of correct solutions, including the one the teacher considered correct. So I could have satisfied my own sense of correctness while still getting a good score on the assignment (this was a big dilemma for me in school; it's not so much a factor now that satisfying my own sense of correctness is more closely aligned with doing a good job).

The moral, as always: don't mess with self-reference unless you really know what you're doing. Start by messing with Texas, and work your way up.

Who knows why it took me so long to come up with this, but I finally did last night while talking to Sumana (who is coming home tomorrow). Continuing my love of randomly generated entertainment, Dadasaurus Rex does for Dinosaur Comics what Dada Pokey did for Pokey the Penguin (or, to look at it another way, what Pokey the Penguin did for itself). Every minute it puts together a new comic using the hard-to-install-on-non-Debian-systems but wonderful Python Imaging Library.

Eventually this system will expand to consume Dada Pokey and its spin-offs, and I'll also add a Five-Card Nancy style game and more different webcomics, and everything will be happy because I'll have finally gotten rid of that horrible 1998 Dada Pokey code. For now, at least most is happy; love those comics!

Update: in personal communication, Ryan North says Dadasaurus Rex is "FANTASTIC".

Sumana, preparing for her vacation to Tokyo, showed me Why don't you try simulation of earthquake,wind and flood damage. Why don't I? Great tourism interface on that site.

Hopefully we are now back for good. I told Kevin to not try to switch us over until his new ISP figures out, as ISPs often do eventually, that they have a customer on the end of the line and that sometimes customers pay them money. Money! They like that, right? Maybe that's the problem; we've all along been trying to motivate them with money but actually they use Mentos or something for currency. "What are these 'electronic transfers' of which you speak? Do they have the great taste and Deutschebank backing of the Freshmaker? We think not! It must be the phone company's problem."

Anyway. Check out this SciAm article on the Voynich manuscript, which argues a mechanism by which Voynich-like text can be created. These disturbing new developments indicate that Voynich is a hoax... perpetrated by Cthulhu!

I think the author of that article gives up in triumph way too early. "The binomial distribution of word lengths can be generated by mixing short, medium-length and long syllables in the table." Sure, but why would that happen? An generation mechanism from which a binomial distribution followed naturally would be a lot more convincing. It's not something that needs to be explained away; it's a clue as to how the text was generated.

Leonard's obsessions collide (collude?) with Gambling on Voting, a comparative analysis of the security standards applied to slot machines and voting machines. Who will win?

I believe it was Shaw who said: "The voting machine pays nobody except him that designs it. Nevertheless, a passion for voting is common, though a passion for designing voting machines is unknown."

From Vice Squad, which mostly deals with vices that do not overlap with my obsessions.

A Lego container ship: my fanboy fantasy? No, it's an official set! It's all brand-named and I like my Lego sets generic (I never even applied those NASA decals on my space shuttle set), but I'm thinking about getting it or at least giving broad hints that it would look nice on my desk. If there was room on my desk.

Lego and Maersk might have some Scandanavian corporate synergy; maybe the container ship set was a cross-promotional deal. Update: Looks like it's been going on for a while, along with other promotional tie-ins.

via ftrain I found the Project Gutenberged works of Stephen Leacock, a sub-Twain, sub-Wodehouse humorist of the early part of the previous century. Some dross, some funny highbrow stuff, reminiscent of where MAD magazine would have been on its highbrowness inevitable-decline curve[0], had it existed when Leacock was writing. Example: this excerpt from Literary Lapses in which he describes everyday activities in terms of the rules of games; in this case, taking a trip by streetcar.

"Should the player who controls the crank perceive a player upon the street desirous of joining in the game by entering the car, his object should be: primo, to run over him and kill him; secundo, to kill him by any other means in his power, tertio, to let him into the car, but to exact the usual philopena."

Good stuff to read while you're waiting for me to update NYCB like I never do.

[0] The inevitable-decline curve is the curve which quantifies the delta of quality over time reflected in the statements "I prefer his earlier work," "Things were better back in the day," etc. It generally looks like this:

q |
u | ---_
a |     ~\
l |       |
i |        \
t |         ~---__
y |_________________
         time
 

The inflection point is precipitated by some event which you take to be the day everything started going to pot, eg. when Dylan went electric or when they started making different faces for different Lego people.

Brickshelf is great; it's got user folders in which people put up pictures of the things they hammered together on the Lego forge. It's also got scanned instruction booklets for a lot of the official Lego sets, but it's more interesting to see peoples' fire engines, Ferris wheels, large-scale reproductions of individual pieces, enormous, messy spacecraft cobbled together from the remains of other spacecraft, where the crew just sit around in vacuum while travelling at superluminal speeds, like in the really old sets, etc. etc.

If I were doing an article on Brickshelf I would have to do stupid journalistic things like talk about how people were using Brickshelf to sell Lego paraphanelia. But since this is just a weblog entry, I can point you to the Lego trilobite and the Lego soccer game, complete with Lego soccer hooligans.

Ray-Traced Lego Mania is also great; its glorious raytraces of retro Lego sets take me back to the days when I had to do a bunch of yardwork to get a really cool set. It's also got some funny joke sets: the Blacktron Ice Cream Disseminator and my favorite, the satirical BURP Adventure.

• You thought there was only one of these pictures.
• But there's a bunch.
• There's more.
• etc.
• What's he doing?
• OK, enough elephants. Here are some elephants.
• And an elephant.
• And some safety elephants.
• How'd he get in here?

Today Zippy is in an automat! (Long, rambling article about my obsession with the automat coming soon.) Yesterday Zippy was also in an automat, and it was funnier, but I forgot to mention it.

Here are the sign letters as they were this morning, and here they are after Intraspect people messed with them. My contact on the inside says, "We were playing around with those for a bit, but without the "ect" we were limited in the scope of our creativity."

The reason the "ect" is still up there is that to take it down they'd have to move their sign-changing apparatus, and they need it in its current position to put up the new sign.

Office scuttlebutt has it that the sign-on-building rent is $1.3 million over I don't know what time period.

Ever since When Jokes Collide I've been obsessed with meta-knock-knock jokes, especially ones that use "the interrupting x" to signal their meta-ness. Here's my current favorite:

"Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"The interrupting time traveller."
"The interrupting ti--"
"Knock knock."

Not as good, but more meta:

"Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"The."
"The who?"
"The punchline."

Sometimes my brain comes up with alternate lyrics to a song. It's not a mondegreen because I know the real lyrics, and anyway the alternate lyrics bear only the slightest resemblance to the real ones. The lyrics my brain comes up with are generally more interesting than the dull, mundane actual lyrics; I think my subconscious thinks that if it comes up with better lyrics to the song, the actual lyrics will change.

Am I the only one this happens to? The only one who talks about it on their weblog?

Example (this happened to me just now):

Then I saw her face
Now I'm a subscriber!

• Can't let anything happen to the poster!
• "So this puppet represents the courts... wait, come back!"