Tentative Timeline For The Jeeves Stories

Morten Morland (@mortenmorland) gives Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne the cartoon-test

“It’s simple, really. If a person is easy to draw, he’ll do well [in politics]. Because the likelihood is he’ll have other interesting characteristics too, which will make him appealing to journalists, thus raising the party’s profile in the media. And people watching are more likely to remember him, which is a bonus!

A quick cartoon-test shows that Nick Clegg, probably the favourite in the party at the moment, will lead the party into eternal oblivion, if elected. He is Mr. Some Bloke embodified – despite the fact that he can speak several languages.

I did a couple of quick sketches, and worringly for him, the best caricature came after I in frustration drew a lifeless mask.

People will see Nick Clegg on TV and wonder whether he’s that guy from marketing whose name they can’t recall – or someone they’ve met at All Bar One.

Chris Huhne on the other hand, is better. Not great, but better. He’s got a prominent crazy eye – a feature that he famously shares with both Maggie and Tony. His mouth is similar to that of a hamster…or a mouse, and remember, those ears will keep growing.

Between Clegg and Huhne, there really is no contest.”

In full here: http://poldraw.wordpress.com/2007/10/15/lib-dems-insist-on-having-an-election/

i think about this post a lot

I have a new post up on my blog, continuing the Fictional History of Numbers series. In part 1 we started with the natural numbers and built up the algebraics, which let us solve equations. In part 2 we started asking geometric questions, and constructed the real numbers.

But the real numbers are weird and hard to define. In part 3 we see one way they're extremely strange, and then talk about why we want them anyway. In the end, we shouldn't worry about the definition of the reals; we should worry about what they allow us to do. And it turns out they're exactly what we need to make calculus function as it should.

It’s impossible to give directions in Boston. Nothing makes sense. There are inexplicable one way streets, there are streets that change their names as you move from one area to another. There’s a road in my area where the gps literally tells you to take TWO full right turns to “stay on” the same road which is at a right angle to the original. There’s like four different Massachusetts Avenues. Sometimes you have to be in the left lane to turn right. The gps can’t even get directions to my workplace correct; it tells me to take a left on a road where lefts are not allowed, and the only way to not have to go across the river and take 15 minutes to turn around is to remember this shit one block early and make the left THERE. Recently, they’ve restricted 1 of 2 lanes on each side of major thoroughfares to only allow bikes and buses, and the government officials seemed to genuinely believe that would somehow EASE traffic. Oh and don't try to drive on Memorial Drive on Sundays; they close it for pedestrians. Just because. And when you DO drive on Memorial, there's one exit that will make your gps lose its mind and start chanting random sequences of numbers for four minutes straight. You can't take a Uhaul on Storrow Drive because the bridges that go over it are too short, and every year some doofus college student ignores this rule and proceeds to "get Storrowed" when they shave off the top of the truck on the overpass and get stuck. I-93 turns into I-95 and makes a big circle around the city, so a lot of the time you'll be on I-95 north but driving east or west.

It’s not limited to driving either. The Arlington train station is not in Arlington, it’s in the middle of downtown. Harvard Square is not a square, it’s more like a pentagon. There are four different green line train routes, and they’re labeled B for Boston College, C for Cleveland Circle, D for… Riverside, and E for… Heath Street. The Silver line is listed on the train map but is entirely run on buses which have to be connected and disconnected from power lines every time you go through the route. The Blue line goes to (and I’m not joking) Wonderland. The two red lines are labeled for their southern points: Braintree line goes to Braintree, and the Ashmont line goes to… Mattapan. To be fair, the train itself stops in Ashmont and you continue to Mattapan on a trolley, but that doesn't make it better. South Station and North Station are 1 mile apart and the easiest way to get from one to the other is just to walk it because otherwise you have to travel through 4 or 5 train stops on two different lines. But make sure you memorize the route because there's a good chance your gps will lose signal in the Financial district because it can't get through the buildings. In Boston Commons there are two train stops within line of sight of each other, on the same street, and one of them screams. To get to the trains at Porter Square, you have to ride down escalators 105 feet below street level, or you could just take the 3 flights of stairs totaling 199 steps (presumably because the engineers had something against nice even numbers). The North End is south of East Boston. Castle Island is part of the mainland.

No matter where you're going or how you're getting there, it takes 45 minutes (no wrong turns) or an hour and a half (one wrong turn). It doesn't matter if you're going one stop on a train; it will take 45 minutes. If it's summer, there's a better than 50% chance you'll be in the train car that lost it's AC; if it's winter, you're guaranteed to be in the car where the heat has it up to 80 degrees and the inside of your winter coat will be a sauna. Check the Red Sox schedule before you go south of the river, or you'll be trapped in the waves of baseball fans flooding the streets and days will go by before you're found again. And just... don't go outside on September 1.

If you're thinking that this sounds eldritch as shit, you're right. The entire city is an arcane lock keeping the ghoulies and ghosties from haunting the rest of the nation. We charge it with every "fuck" we utter while we travel our labyrinthine paths and drink our Dunks. You're welcome.

I have a new post up on my blog, continuing the Fictional History of Numbers series. In part 1 we built on the natural numbers using algebraic operations, and got the algebraic numbers. In part 2 and part 3 we used geometric and analytic arguments to build up the real numbers.

These two sets of numbers overlap, but aren't the same; there are real numbers that aren't algebraic (as we saw in part 3) but also algebraic numbers that aren't real. So what happens if we combine the two? We get the complex numbers, which are complete and also algebraically closed. But proving this is a little tricky, and touches on the deep strangeness of complex analysis.

And in the process of adding algebraic closure to the real numbers, we lose the ability to order them, which has its own consequences.

A new post up on my blog!  Last time we talked about the algebraic numbers, and how just wanting to solve simple equations can create a ton of different numbers.  But they don’t get us everything.

So this time we start off with the idea of measurement, and wind up inventing the real numbers.  The real numbers are weird.  Real weird.  But they show up when we start asking questions about size or measurement.  And in part 3, we’ll see they’re exactly the right way to do calculus.

I learned today that the International Baccalaureate organization (the ones who run the IB tests) consider the topics lists for their courses to be copyrighted and confidential. They won't share them without a signed release.

I'm genuinely offended by this. I don't know how the fuck you're supposed to evaluate or understand the program without knowing what topics it covers! (They'll share the topics list with me, specifically, in the course of evaluating the test for my university; but I have to sign a release, and have to promise not to share them with colleagues, because they want my colleagues to sign the same release.)

And there's, like, no point to this. It's not a major secret what the topics a calculus course should cover are. (And sure, they do some stats and matrices or something too, and that's all the added info.) I think you can't even legally "copyright" the contents of these lists, because it's factual information and that's not copyrightable.

I'm really seriously tempted to issue an official recommendation to my university to stop giving any credit for IB tests until this policy gets reversed. If they won't freely share information on the program and the test, we'll have to assume that it's valueless and shouldn't earn credit.

(My only hesitation to that is it's probably a quixotic quest that would just hassle some innocent IB students. But if I can get a bunch of other departments to sign on I'll absolutely do it; IB can't sustain that policy if universities stop rolling over for it.)

In 2011 a woman named Maureen Seaburg wrote a book about synesthesia called Tasting the Universe and there's a whole chapter about Billy Joel that he did a fairly extensive interview for and I have literally found no other evidence of him discussing synesthesia before or since.

Full chapter under the cut:

I got the Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage for free from Thriftbooks (after much fussing about getting the book rewards points spent for the best value) and it's like YES, SOMEONE WHO LIKES FOOTNOTING THEIR COMICS AS MUCH AS ME.

Also it's an amazing set of 4 panels

Why do we use the symbol for partial derivatives as the symbol for boundaries of manifolds?