November 2004 Archives

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal...along with these instructions

"A look and say sequence will never contain a digit greater than 3 unless that digit appears in the first or second term."

Elementary Number Theory in Nine Chapters, by James J. Tattersall

I'm somewhat depressed for various reasons, so I shall discuss mathematics: the pastime of all famous depressives.

I was riding in a car to Seattle in the dark. One can't easily read in the dark, so I was forced into pure thought. Among other things, I entertained the problem of a finding the length of any curve. Let's say say you have some crazy curve represented by a the function y=f(x). Finding the distance along the curve over an interval [a,b] turned out to be an interesting problem of whose solution I was not aware. So I thought about it, and I had an epiphany. It was a very elementary epiphany, but an epiphany which led me to this solution to the problem:

Consider a function y=f(x). Let L be the length of the curve over an interval [a,b]. Now divide L in differential units dl. Since each unit dl approximates a straight line, the distance of each is given by the Pythagorean theorem. So dl=((x₁ - x₂)² + (y₁ - y₂)²)^1/2. Rewriting this gives dl=(Δx² + Δy²)^1/2, and finally dl=(dx² + dy²)^1/2 since Δx and Δy shrink to differentials for a dl. Integration gives L=∫(dx² + dy²)^1/2. So simple! It checks out for y=x. I tried it for y=x² doing the integration using trig substitutions and it is a pretty ungodly integral to solve. Numerical integration performed on a TI-89 leads me to suspect that I've got the correct solution.

This is the kind of thing that makes me love calculus. Without having the sacred knowledge, this problem is unbelievably daunting and would require somekind of brilliant insight. With the calculus, it just takes a few minutes of thinking and voila! The result is simple, elegant and practical.

Sprague, the first speech tournament of the year, was today. It's a relatively small tournament with only debate events. Since it is the first tournament of the year, we only sent two teams, although a number of new team-members came to observe. Everyone one on our team is, of course, somewhat behind on practicing and rehearsing in all events, but come next weekend, people should have gotten their acts more together.

I'm not a fan of vulgar language or coarse slang, but I believe that it has a proper place in our diction. Because of their vulgarity, these words can especially impart sense of disgust much more forcefully than ordinary words, when the occasion calls for it. So when I choose the word "fucked" to describe our overall performance, my choosing it in place such a word as "abysmal" is meant to portray the certain vehemence with which I am disappointed. It was the worst tournament on record for me. We went 1-3 in the senior division (oddly, there were novice and junior divisions as well). Despite my excessive pessimism, I feel very strongly that we should have won our last debate. Nevertheless, the only consolation is that I won an award for being the 4th rated speaker out of the 28 speakers in the division. The other team from Wilson, Ian Rocker and Jon Kadish did a little better, going 2-2. Ian was rated 5th speaker additionally.

Let's just say that I'm now thoroughly motivated for the next tournament. Actually, the next tournament is next Friday and Saturday, but I don't think that it has public debate. Following that, the next tournament is on December 4th. I need to get my extemp abilities back up to their old self. Oh well, we never do particularly outstanding until January anyway.

"We take user feedback very seriously. If you have that feedback then you should feed it back to us because we will feed it to the product team."

--Microsoft employee referring to the corporation's claim that IE's market share is not under attack by Mozilla because IE already has the features that its users want.

A February 1999 Gallup poll asked respondents whether they would or would not vote for a candidate based on certain characteristics. Atheists were the least preferred group, with nearly 50% of respondents saying that they would not vote for an atheist. This even led homosexuals, who were trailing around 37%.

There is no question that the United States is truly a nation under god: according to one study, 81% of Americans identify themselves with a particular religion, and 75.6% of Americans identify themselves as Christians. These numbers are, of course, declining over time, and this has led to the cultural divide that has caused controversy over such issues as abortion and homosexual rights. Most of these issues have arguments on both sides that are dynamic and not entirely based on religious dogma. On one particular issue however, the Christian fundamentalist forces are blatently flawed, and the effects of their ignorance are damaging the intelligence of children today. This contention is, of course, over the teaching of evolution and creationism in public science classes. The drive for creationism to be a part of public education in this country is still quite strong, and anti-evolution sentiment is passionate. This has led to new renditions of creationism, such as "intelligent design," which seek to sneak into public education by espousing the same fundamentals of the Christian beliefs of creation, while bypassing the Establishment Clause by simply not making reference to the Bible. With the alleged ideal of allowing students to get "both sides" of the "arugment," these initiatives have been somewhat successful.

The irony of the dispute is that there really isn't any scientific "argument" at all, as creationists posit. Virtually no biologists of any kind believe in creationist theory. Therein lies the inherent contradiction of creationist unreason. There is absolutely no logical reason for creationism being taught in science classes, regardless of whether it is even true or not. Science is the process of drawing generalizations from observed phenomena. Creationism does not do this. Creationism explains absolutely NO observed phenomena. It is mostly incompatible with natural observations. Since it is based in the supernatural, it is fundamentally impossible to determine whether it is right or wrong, so we must go on how well it explains empirical data. Evolutionary theories are not perfect, but they do a far, far superior job explaining nature. Creationism explains nothing because it's not science. And nonscience should not be taught in a class dedicated to science. Furthermore, the teaching of Biblical creationism would effectively constitute an act of state-endoresement, prohibited by both the "endorsement test" established by the Supreme Court in 1985 in Wallace v. Jaffee. It would also breach the "wall of separation" between the church and state and arguably fail the Lemon test established by the Court in 1971 by the ruling Lemon v. Kurtzman.

There is this odd tendency throughout history for religious fundamentalists to be proven wrong, time after time. There's another odd tendency for the "rabid secularists," atheists, and scientists to be proven correct, time after time. I find it rather perplexing.

Leeor went to Reed to talk to a math professor about our plans to study multivariable calculus. He said that we were crazy. He didn't give us the lecture notes to the multivariable courses, but he did give us the notes for Introduction to Analysis. They're 300 pages long. Apparently the math department thinks that all of the available textbooks are terrible, so they write these massive notebooks. Once we complete it, we will go back in to "prove" our knowledge of the material and pick up the notes for math 211 and 212. We'll see how it goes.

Due to the recent spam-attack, readers wanting to buy viagra online should have no worries...

The First Level of Hell:
After an inordinately long period of time and many failed downloads, I finally finished downloading Fedora Core 2. Excited, I installed it, and then I booted into it. The installation was uneventful, except for a warning message that I had never seen before. It said something about there being a possible problem with the partition geometry. I casually dismissed it and continued with the installation. After booting, everything seemed fine initially, but my DSL was not working on the new installation as it had on my old Red Hat 9. Despite this, I was not fazed. I did, however, need to check my email, so I rebooted to launch the Windows partition. After GRUB came up I got a mysterious output and the computer hung. It appeared that the Fedora installation had mucked with my partition tables, even on my Windows partition, thus leaving me incapable of booting into Windows. This has led me to the conclusion that the vast majority of Linux hackers must be the most incompetant dolts imaginable to release an OS with this malevalent problem.

The Second Level of Hell:
Comment spam on this blog has reached Brobdignagian proportion. I neither jest nor exaggerate. In the period of two days during which I have been without the use of my computer and email, I have been unable to be vigilant against the merciless horde of the comment-spammers. In this period, this blog has received over 130 comment spams. This means that my backlog of comment-spams to delete is approaching 150. Since I am unable to employ my IP-blocking strategy when I don't have email access, the weaknesses of this strategy for dealing with such a volume spam is coming painfully into focus. There are some options that are in consideration.

The Third Level of Hell:
In my lovely class of AP US Government and Politics, the grading system is essentially designed such that it would be extremely difficult not to get an A or B, difficult not to get an A, and somewhat hard not to get over 100%. I have decried this system and the idiotic method by which Marchese instructs without avail. But the obscenity of unreason was demonstrated in a very contrary way this week. Despite the fact that we have done a number of assignments besides tests, Marchese decided that in order to make it easier for him to tally up the points on his grade sheet (he doesn't even use computer grading!), he would only count the tests (they are the first 3 items of the grade sheet: factoring in other assignments would require adding such things as item 6 and possibly 7!). This leaves three tests that comprise the bulk of the grade. The first test was a multiple-choice, computer-generated test with completely random and specific questions that were often irrelevant. The highest score out of the 70 or so students who took it was 90%. That was the only A. With an 82%, I was somewhere around 5th or 6th of 70. The questions were taken from extremely specific about seeminly unimportant sections of the book. An example of this was a question on the method by which the first president of Mexico was chosen. Considering that this course is supposed to be US Government and Politics, this is a rather surprising question. The second test was an old take-home practice AP test from 1994. The entire thing was due yesterday. This is rather surprising considering that our class lasts a semester. It would be suprising that we should be expected to know the half of the material which we have not yet been taught. It was a take-home test, but it is still unfair to expect people to know material from 50% of a class that they have not been taught. In any case, thanks to Greg Tainter's scoring of my essays, I got some weird decimal score like 89.34%. Those unique and honest individuals like Jonathan Kadish, who decided to change all of their answers as they corrected their test, of course, received 100%. The final item that comprises the grade is a take-home test on which I will probably receive 98% (assuming I receive full credit on the essay portion, which is very likely). The imperfection of my score is due to two flawed questions. All I will say is that Congress does limit debt by setting a debt ceiling, and that Congress does have the implied power to censor TV and radio broadcasts (the FCC exists to do this now, and the FCC was created by Congress by the implied powers linked to the Commerce Clause of the constitution). Despite the obvious incorrectness of at least one of the questions, Marchese has admitted that there is no way that he will change the questions on the test. In other words, if the test is wrong, he doesn't care. This repeated idiocy of grading has led to the fact that I am 1 point short of an A for this quarter. Thankfully quarter grades are meaningless and more like midterms than anything else, but I am still incensed at this blatant disregard for fact and truth. Furthermore, it is objectionable that much of the work we have done this quarter is not being counted toward this quarter's grade. Nevertheless, by the semester when the disturbing amount of allowed extra credit is tallied into the equation, and all of my work is recorded, I will have far greater than 100%. I oppose both of these grades on principle. One is an example of grade deflation and the other is an example of grade inflation. Both are inaccurate representations of a person's performance.

The Fourth Level of Hell:
This is the week for TESTS!! Lots and lots of TESTS!! I did well on the government test, and I think I did well on the physics and ecology tests. I should do well on the english test tomorrow too. Regardless, it's not pleasant stuff.

Escaping the First Level of Hell:
After not having enough time to do anything about it, I finally paid homage to the great god Google and discovered that this is apparently bug with the Fedora installer. Whenever Fedora is installed on a dual-boot machine, this nasty bug changes something like the allocation of heads in the drive (not quite so sure). After the great god Google came forth and delivered me from the evil of poor programming, I did some mucking with the extremely dangerous tool sfdisk in a linux shell and managed to fix the problem. I'm not entirely positive what I did, but I can now boot into Windows.

Finally:
I also ask that you refrain from posting comments for several days until I can get a handle on this spam indundation. I also have this interesting thought on ecology. The people reading this blog with doctorates in the subject will probably view my thoughts as elementary and trite, but I find it compelling at the moment. I've also become obsessed with the issue of outsourcing. Rather than wait until I take econ next semester, I'm going to do a little research myself. At this point, I'm becoming convinced that outsourcing is the greatest trend since sliced bread going out of vogue. Give me a day or two, and there will be more to come! Apologies for the numerous typos; I really blitzed through this one and I don't want to reread it.

I was thinking about Thoreau today. I like Thoreau. But I was thinking of him, and the thought occurred to me that he is no more than a very insightful 19th century blogger. Contrary to the impression that you may form from this statement if mine is the only blog you read, this does not diminish the impressive nature of his work. To me this seems to be the case because of his style of loose-knit, extended essays that sometimes meander aimlessly, but always happen upon an interesting point, no matter how leisurely path.

This evening I saw the first of the fall plays. As usual, it was good, but I found myself being exceedingly critical of it in my mind. I think that I have become increasingly critical and negative in recent years, so my analysis of this follows that trend. There should be no mistake that Simrell's alienation of Leeor and many of the other more experienced stage managers led to drastic consequences in the set. The walls looked bad, the paint was sketchy, and the decor lacked a cohesion to the period. The new costume designer failed to create any kind of unification of the characters' garb; the clothing was a random amalgam of colors and styles. The new person hired to replace Leeor on the lighting design did a terrible job. The lighting was not angled properly to illuminate the faces of the characters, nor did the lighting colors match well with the colors of the set. Aside from these gripes about the set, the acting was quite good. My only complaint was that, despite the script, it seemed too farsical at points. The acting overdramatized certain humorous lines, when it should have kept the momentum going through the slapstick. Aside from that, I enjoyed it immensely and complement everyone.

In other news, I finally have gotten my mom's laptop connected wirelessly to the network, and I just need to get a print server and rebuild my computer before I am finished with my renovations. All good things!

I finally have DSL. Yay. Now I'm only barely in the dark ages. I did a speed test at DSLReports, which measured my download rate to be 208k, and my upload rate to be 212k at the moment. Slow as molasses by most standards, but zippy as can be by my own. I still have some work to do setting up my wireless network, now that my odyssey with Qwest is nearing completion. In order to test the mettle of my new connection I am downloading the four ISO images of Fedora Core 2.

"We have got to stop having the campaigns run in this country based on abortion, guns, God, and gays."

--Howard Dean

Kerry will lose. At least I'll win a dollar. I believe that this is the time for mentioning an exceptionally astute point of Ted's. Historically speaking, with possible exception only in the late 1790s, parties that have been favored by the white South have always been viewed as some of the worst, regressive parties with the least long-term success. The South is, of course, a Republican stronghold. I'm not bitter at all.

Democrats have faired rather well in Oregon though. No Senate seats were up for reelection, so they're still split 1-1. The House split remained 4-1 in Democratic favor. Despite Multnomah county's 60-40 No vote on the constitutional amendment to define marriage, the amendment is still passing by about 52-48. Multnomah county seems to be failing measure 26-64, the recall of the county's temporary income tax surcharge. It's set to expire in two years anyway. So Multnomah county can't pull the entire state along with everything, but it can with a lot of stuff.