Student of Trinity

1 3 5 7 This is odd mnemonic heaven.

If the test is really accurate then it's a great idea, but it's easy to suspect that in some subtle way it isn't really perfect. Some of the things that it's supposed to detect are things that can be achieved in a lot of very different ways, and it would be very easy for a test to fail to recognize some of these ways, and look only for others. In fact I at least half suspect that such a perfect test might be impossible in principle. If the test were even slightly unreliable, I might not want to take it. Even if it were in fact perfect, I probably wouldn't believe it could be. So I don't know. I might be unable to resist the curiosity to see what the test might say about me, but I'd have serious reservations, fearing that it might mislead me, and I might believe it.

Can you see electron spin, or do you just let the cobalt decay for a while and then see what's left?

So that's why today we need strange mnemonics: overfishing.

My father explained to me once, when I was maybe six or something, which of my arms was left and and which was right. I was standing with my upper arms at my sides and my elbows bent so that my forearms stuck out forwards. I was facing the kitchen table, and looking down at my hands as my dad explained left and right. For years afterwards I would tell left from right by remembering that scene.

It should come to an enned.

Yeah. I guess I'm just postulating a major new use for large scale AI: giving everyone an appreciative audience. In the future, everyone will be famous forever, among the bots that have been designed specifically to obsess over their every word. For now, maybe we could just install a laugh track.

This is actually interesting, but on the other hand: do we really need another way to rank members? Especially, a way that weights their distant pasts as much as their presents? The original idea was to rate threads, and even that was a concession to the reality of sample sizes, from the ideal goal of rating individual posts, for spamminess. Edgwyn suggested some sort of rolling average of keyword overlap, as a way of measuring speed of topic drift. If your post doesn't include any of the frequent words in the preceding page of posts, that's a pretty fast drift. For interest, we could just let each post have interest 1 by default, and add to that the number of Likes the post receives. That's pretty crude, but it might not be too bad in practice, unless we were mainly concerned with perniciously pointless posts that really are not interesting at all. In my fantasy world, the forum software would compute the Spam number automatically for each post, and update it as Likes come in; and show the poster (but no-one else) the score their post had reached. I imagine this serving the purpose of those little speed radars that simply show you how fast you're going, so you'll go Yikes and slow down if you're well above the limit. The main problem I see is that deliberate trolls would make a point of trying to rack up high Spam numbers. I have a feeling this might do more harm than we received in the way of the benefit that unconscious spammers woke up to their spamminess and repented.

Heh. <physics> Hydrodynamics is governed by a single equation that is fairly simple in form, but horribly hard to solve; its solutions seem to be as complicated as fluid flow really is. A clever trick that goes surprisingly far to make sense of it is to re-express all its terms in purely numerical terms, as multiples of standard units that are judiciously chosen for the problem at hand. So if you've got water flowing in a 3-inch-wide pipe, you take the pipe diameter as your unit of length; and so on. It's not completely trivial, because you also take into account the viscosity of the fluid, and stick it into some of your units. If I remember rightly, I think it may be used to rescale the unit of time. A lot of apparently very different flow patterns become the same, when you re-scale them in these ways. Whether the patterns are really exactly the same up to re-scaling, or not, depends on a few purely numerical ratios among scales. The most important of these ratios is the Reynolds number, which is defined as the product of the salient length scale in the problem and the salient speed scale, divided by the fluid viscosity. Molasses has a much higher viscosity than water, but if you send molasses through a much wider pipe at a much higher speed, you'll see a flow that is surprisingly similar to that of slower water in the narrower pipe, because the Reynolds numbers of the two flows will be the same. The Reynolds number is rarely an exact value, because there's usually some fuzziness in selecting exactly what lengths or speeds to use in it. But it's a ballpark figure that is normally pretty clearly pinned down to within less than a factor of ten. If the Reynolds number is less than 1, you tend to get really boring flows like what you normally see with molasses. What you mostly care about is whether it's up into the thousands or higher, because somewhere in this range there is usually a transition from smooth ('laminar') flow, like a slow river, to turbulent flow, like rapids. </physics> So in principle there should exist a Spam number that can characterize roughly how spammy a thread is. You could multiply the average length of a post by the speed of topic drift, and divide by how interesting the posts are. A series of long posts on abruptly changing topics that aren't even interesting would be the worst kind of thread, and have a very high Spam number. Short spammy posts aren't as bad, and highly interesting digressions are more acceptable. This is only kind of a joke, actually. Obviously there's no clear way to quantify interest, or even speed of drift, but I think the idea that these are the relevant factors may be worth something.

Somewhere there's a distinction between topic drift and topic turbulence; a Reynold's number of relevance, shall we say. The idea is to try to stay laminar.

My memory of that relic (which is faint) is that it was a bit outdated even when it was new; many of the people in it were no longer posting that much at the time. Maybe TM really was the only bad egg who got slack because of Blades. At the time it was my impression that various people whose names I now forget were getting away with stuff for some reason, and I figured it was similar. Even in the Blades-did-it theory, the high point of activity wouldn't necessarily be the high water of Blades. Making scenarios was hard work, and not that many people ever really did it. My impression was always that Blades somehow gave the boards a lot of extra juice, but I'm thinking the effect would be somewhat indirect. Like a big house party, where having a handful of people in the kitchen playing guitars and drinking whiskey all night keeps everything going, because if anything dies down somewhere else, people don't just go home; they check out the kitchen.

The special thing with Blades was that people were doing something — making their own scenarios. People discussed how to do things, and what things would be good to do. It was creative like writing books, but specific to a Spiderweb product that had a lot of special quirks. There was a core of creative people who had a serious reason for reading and posting here a lot. It was kind of a reactor core, that powered everything else. I mean, the impact of Blades on the boards in general could be quite direct. If it weren't for all his Blades contributions, TM would have been banned before ever becoming a mascot monster. A lot of the wild west spirit whose passing some now lament was supported by Blades, in that Blades kept people from being banned. Hanging out here soon after the Blades era had mostly passed was a bit like joining the army after a war. You could see that the old guys had been through something. AIMHack has been a little bit like that, but I don't think that hammering out AIMHack rules and infrastructure has been nearly as substantial a technical subject as manipulating the Blades engines and editors. The scaling of people involved is also very different. On the one hand an AIMHack campaign needs half a dozen people to keep it up for a dozen sessions, while a BoX scenario took just one person, often working for many dozens of hours. On the other hand, only those six people are ever going to experience that AIMHack campaign, while a good scenario might in principle be played very many times. There was both a need and an incentive for much deeper involvement with Blades than I think there is with AIMHack, and Blades projects weren't as dependent as AIMHack on getting six people to co-ordinate their schedules.

One theory I have is that something starts a group, and some kind of critical mass of people show up who post interesting things. That makes the group interesting, and more people join. At some point, however, the age-blind internet has the scales fall from its eyes. If enough people keep posting about the 1990s as though they were recent, that sends a certain message. At some point, the very activity that makes the group good keeps newer people away. So the group has a vigorous middle age, with lots of activity from the same gang of oldbies, and then it declines, as those few people drift away. It isn't even necessarily the problem that the oldbies are boring and out of touch. It would be just as bad, for closing the group, if the oldbies were awesome. Imagine some bright young kid shows up with a post about this story they liked. Ten years earlier, that would have been one of the interesting posts that fired things up. But now, some oldby comes by and says, Yeah, great story, here's what I wrote about it last year in my Master's thesis." And then some even olderby says, "Yeah, I wrote that story in a foxhole under shellfire during the Zombie Incursion of ought-six! My ol' buddy Zack didn't make it. He was one of the best." So the kid doesn't post so much any more. What this town needs is a boys' band. There should be a forum reserved for new members. Nobody could post there if they had more than 1000 posts.

I think a lot of groups have an inherent life cycle. People meet and form some sort of community; they share some history, develop inside jokes. Those very things make that inner group harder to join, thereafter. The circle forms by closing. As years go by, things happen, and the original crew drifts apart. I was never into Blades, and the Blades story must be at least ten years old by now, but I still think that Blades was the story here. It brought a creative community together over something that demanded a lot of time and thought. There was a world to explore. I think that episode gave this community a boost for a decade. I'm not trying to be discouraging if people want to fire things up again. I'm just saying that there's no reason to feel bad if we're less active than we were. I don't think we screwed anything up, at least not in any big way. That's just how it goes.

This, I'm afraid. I spent seven years in the army reserves in Canada. We had mean green uniforms with helmets and stuff, we had fancy highland uniforms with kilts and swords, we had snappy suit-like uniforms with green berets. For most of that time I had lieutenant's bars and an air of command. Some guys I knew were losers but most were buff, assertive guys with sharp minds. The incidence of successful babe magnetism among that group was distinctly lower than among a similar pool without the uniforms. I tell ya, I speak from experience. By all means join the reserves if you think you'd enjoy it, and can afford the time. Do not do it to attract women.

That expression, "straw man". I don't think it means what you think it means.

I say again: I speak from experience. There's a finite amount of time in the day, and the reserves don't pay enough to be a career. If your pitch is that some part-time soldiering on top of a regular job is equivalent to being a corporate executive, then you're aiming at a pretty clueless audience. For them, you could just buy a costume. In fact women aren't all the same. Perhaps you're thinking of cheeseburgers.

From experience, I can say that joining the army reserves is one of the worst possible mating strategies for a male. It takes a lot of time away from your social life, and you will be unlikely to meet a romantic partner among your military associates.

In writing I think I agree, but the only way I can achieve brevity is to revise by cutting, and that's hard to do in speech. I've read that some people in the American South speak in slow, lapidary sentences, as if what you hear were a third draft. That would be cool to hear. I don't know if I'd be enthralled or enraged. I just ran into an example of a dead metaphor that has become second-order figurative in the way I meant above: "key", used as an adjective, as in "a key concept". Most of the time this just means "important", but sometimes you "literally" mean that a key concept is one that unlocks things. You still don't mean it's a concept about keys.

And for really long distances there's the Alorael Cannon.

Well the first days are the hardest days Don't you worry any more 'Cause when life looks like easy street There is danger at your door. Think this through with me; Let me know yer mahnd. Oh woah, what I want to kno-ow Is, Are you canned?

Actually the phrase was once a legal term, referring to members of religious orders who had formally abandoned all worldly property and therefore fell under ecclesiastical jurisdiction. "Dead to the world" is not a Biblical phrase directly but it is a close echo, or perhaps a somewhat free translation, of several verses in the epistles of Paul. Whether the intended meaning in that context counts as literal or figurative is a bit hard to judge. I guess that's the other thing I feel about supposed misuse of 'literally': literal and figurative are slippery concepts, anyway. Maybe they're only relative terms. Sometimes 'literally' seems to be the most efficient qualifier to convey what you mean. You don't have to take it literally.

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but I don't think it's what I mean. There are a lot of dead metaphors, expressions whose literal meaning is entirely forgotten. People only think of their figurative meaning; it has, in effect, become the literal meaning. So for example people don't think of an expression like "dead to the world" as a figurative expression having the literal meaning of being physically dead; they think of it as a stock phrase that means being entirely oblivious of one's surroundings. That originally figurative meaning is itself often something rather extreme, even if not as extreme as the original literal meaning. Being totally oblivious of one's surroundings is an extreme case that doesn't actually happen very often. People often say "dead to the world" when someone is just a bit distracted. In effect a new figurative use has emerged. So my theory is that the original literal meaning of "dead to the world" has been forgotten, in practice. People think of 'totally unaware of surroundings' as the literal meaning of the expression, which is used as an exaggerated figure of speech for a state of mild distraction.

"I literally just ate a sandwich" could mean either, "No, it wasn't half an hour ago" or "No, I did not have chips with it." Some metaphors have become so stale that even their figurative meaning is often used figuratively, and I think that people are often using 'literally' correctly, but applying it to a second layer of figurativeness, while entirely forgetting a first layer. So, "I literally drove my car into the ground" could simply mean, "I really was fully responsible for wrecking my car, not just partly or casually so."

College is a convenient time for pairing up, because everybody has just left home, everybody you meet is close to your age and station in life, and everybody has quite a lot of free time, compared to later life. If you get through college still single, you're naturally still apt to be thinking of mate-finding in college terms. Most of the people that fit that picture, someone-I-would-happily-have-dated-in-college, will of course be marrying their college sweethearts, because that's the picture they fit. There's nothing wrong with that picture. My parents were college sweethearts, they'll be celebrating their fiftieth anniversary this summer, they have three sons and nine grandchildren, they're still each others' best friends. My youngest brother and his wife met at college. But it's not the only way, by any means. It does get a bit harder in some ways, to find a partner later. Nobody is ever as conveniently packaged again, somehow, as they were at college. Nobody is as flexible, as willing to be defined by a new relationship. People are more likely to have had previous relationships that didn't work, or to have gone longer being unhappily single and had to deal with that. People may have achieved things, or suffered things, maybe even big things, before you met them. The stem cells differentiate. People become more different, in many different ways. It's less easy to just 'click' by being similar in a few ways, and different in a few ways, and attracted and young and willing to grow together. The jigsaw puzzle has more corners. But those things are all kind of interesting, actually. It's certainly not the case that no good people are left. There are a lot of awesome people still looking after college. It can be harder for those people to find each other than it was at college. I don't know any magic tricks for making this easier, but the big thing is to make time for it. If you get too busy with activities in which you'll never meet a likely partner, then that'll be a problem, because he or she is not just going to sit down in front of you in the lecture hall one day any more. This is a fact and it needs to be dealt with.