Plurp: Same old crap

Bigger!

2002.02.10 : 2002.02.16

Saturday, February 16, 2002
Blab. Correcting our foolish gaffe about the shortest palindromic date representations, a reader writes:
No, you are not correct.
Use a procedure similar to yours, except where D' is the reverse of the first n-1 digits of D, where D is an n-digit number, produces a format wherein all dates are palindromic, and the representation for any given date is one digit shorter than yours.
For example, a day 1234 days after day 0 has the representation 12344321 in your system, but 1234321 in mine.
Absolutely right.

Blab. Proving that great minds think alike, another reader says the same thing, but shorter.
It seems slightly better to use DE', where E is every character of D BUT THE LAST, and E' is the reverse of E.
-pTang
So, readers, is that the shortest representation?

Blab. Another reader, accustomed to taking the easy way out, ignores the assumptions of our problem.
The most compact date format is the one in which each date has a single, unique, symbol.
As in, the date formerly referred to as the name formerly used by the artist formerly known as Prince? Got it.

Blab. Mistaking our humble blog for a bakery, a reader writes:
I would like to subscribe to your "Cookie of the Month" club. Here is my credit card number 2197 8457...
Sadly, some glitch in the underbelly of the glorious machinery that is Plurp seems to have cut off the last few digits, expiration date of the card, and of course the name of our gentle reader. Upon your provision of this information, however, we would be happy to sign you up for our Cookie of the Month club.
How much does a bakery cost these days?

Blab. A reader suffers from another bout of existential confusion.
Usage Statistics for www.stevewhite.org
- What does it all mean?
Beats the heck out of us. As far as we can tell, more people are coming to our Web site than ever before. We have no idea why. Possibly a worldwide epidemic of madness.

Blab. A reader has a new theory.
loving the discussion (lecture?) on dates...I have a question. I know that I could actually figure it out myself given enough hours in the day.
Question: just how many hours are there in a day?
Brought up in the box we would confidently conjecture "24" but it is alas, wrong.
I can conjure that while I enjoy 12 midnight 12 hours before you do, and you enjoy the dame date 12 hours after I quit it, that there must be at least 36 hours in a day.
But then there are those clever little states and nations after New York (going counter clockwise of course) so there are more hours than 36...48 hours in a day?
Well, something like that.
By recursion, we determine that days are arbitrarily long, explaining how that god guy could get so much done in just one of them.

Blab. A Left Coast reader seems to subscribe to this same theory.
Happy Valentine's Day, Steve!--Marianne and David--We get more time to wish these things to our East Coast friends because we live on the Left Coast where the time zone is a little more forgiving. XXXX
So Right Coasters are ahead of the trend, whereas Left Coasters have more time to catch up. What does that mean for Katmandu?

Blab. Marianne wants us to halp solve a small Question.
Can you halp me solve a small Question?

Location: http://www.stevewhite.org/stuff/BigBlabBox.html

File MIME Type: text/html

Source: Currently in disk cache

Local cache file: cache504559.html

Last Modified: Fri, Nov 9, 2001 1:27:40 PM Local time

Last Modified: Fri, Nov 9, 2001 9:27:40 PM GMT

Content Length: 3245

Expires: No date given

Why, if you have a Feb 15 entry is the last date modified Nov. 9?
I'm trying to teach the kids at SFDS how to recognize out of date material in their reluctant attempts to be critical users of information. If a site cites not, then wot?
You are wonderful.
Marianne
Hmm. This is actually two questions, but we'll only charge you for the one.
Q: Why does one page of a Web site have a different "Last Modified" time than another page from that same Web site?
A: Because the two pages were last modified on different dates. In this case, we last modified the Big Blab Box page in November of last year, whereas we last modified this page, uh, today.
Q: How can people recognize out of date information on the Web?
A: This is much tougher! If the "Last Modified" date is during the Ming dynasty, then either (a) it's pretty old or (b) somebody fiddled with the "Last Modified" date. On the other hand, if the "Last Modified" date is today, then either (a) it's very recent or (b) somebody fiddled with the "Last Modified" date.
We sometimes go back and correct heinous misspellings in our ancient Web pages, for instance. While doing so adds no new content per se, it does change the "Last Modified" date to whenever we did the correction.
Isn't the Web a great place?
For those interested in forensic Webulation, we recommend investigating the Internet Archive (and, in particular, the Wayback Machine), which tries to archive everything on the Web every day so that you can see what a site looked like last May. Hey - maybe this will finally be a real use for the Archive. (We've always thought it was a cute idea, but could never figure out anything useful to do with it.)
And yes, we are wonderful.

Blab. A reader gives the appropriate Masonic Fifth Circle response.
Somebody set up us the bomb
Joseph has found the temple, brother.

Plurp. We are incredibly tired. We attribute it to a tiring week at work, with meetings stuffed into every temporal crevice. (We generally hate meetings; our life seems organized around them these days.) But, more precisely, it's due to a few incredibly stressful meetings involving messy interpersonal interactions. (We generally hate interacting with other people; that's why we went into technical work, after all.) It's not that we mind telling morons to shut up and sit down, you understand. (We generally enjoy that, in fact.) It's that we hate having to do it so politely that they do not realize that we are defaming their ancestry.

Yo. We notice that the many superheroes of our childhood have sold their wild spandex superhero suits on eBay. And that they were all purchased by Olympic athletes.
We feel sure they are out to vanquish evildoers.

Plurp. We are continually dismayed by nationalism in the Olympics. It's the U.S. "team" even when no teamwork is involved. It's how many medals were won by the U.S. vs. Russia. (Not men vs. woman, gays vs. straights or blacks vs. whites, all of which, presumably, would be Politically Offensive; not so offensive politics, of course.)
So how about this? Let's allocate the number of people who can compete from some given region (oh, all right, we'll call them "countries" if you insist) proportionally to the population of that region. So there will be a lot of Olympic competitors from "China", a few less from "India", yet fewer for "Indonesia" and then there will be the also-rans like the U.S. and (snicker) France. Luxembourg can send someone's left foot.
But we need to do more to eliminate nationalism. Let's ban country-specific uniforms. No flags. No country emblems. And let's not play the pathetic national anthem of whatever "nation" the Gold Medalists live within. Let's play the Olympic Anthem. After all, the point is not national supremacy, but individual accomplishment, right?
Also, let's tighten the requirements for judges. Judges must be former Olympic medallists, so they actually know something about the sport, and they must have impeccable professional resumes as judges for the event that they are judging. No more biased amateurs. Sorry. And no one who has previously been disqualified under scandal; that has become tedious.
Hey, it's just a suggestion.

Yo. Would you take a trip into interplanetary space, in a craft on its way to a distant galaxy, if you knew you couldn't come back to Earth and you would never live to see the final destination? We used to fantasize about being invited by aliens, ala Close Encounters, to see the universe, leaving everything we knew behind. It was a compelling fantasy, as we've always been entranced with what's Out There.
These days, we probably wouldn't take them up on the offer. At least, not if our only company was those cute translucent aliens whose English skills were rather limited. We'd really want to have Helen along, and at least a few other friends and colleagues.
It'd be nice, as the article suggests, to take a whole city, ala James Blish's Cities in Flight, though we never really believed the economics of it. Even if you encapsulated all of southern Manhattan and rocketed it into space, could you really afford a symphony orchestra five years hence, or a new Gehry Museum of Modern Art? We fear these folks would be busy cleaning the urine filters, or replacing the rat traps.
The sad fact is that we're not going to get faster-than-light travel. And that means that we're pretty much stuck here. While it would be quite spectacular to fly by Mars and Jupiter and Saturn, that alone would take several decades, and we'd probably never live long enough to fly by Uranus (don't start). And most of the time, the view would be pretty dull.
It is sad, being stuck down here at the bottom of the gravity well. We had such hopes. But it's a nice place, really, and we are having a good time. Still ...
Anyway, ours is not the only view. In a BBC reader poll on the topic, a guy named James from the UK said:
"Mum, Dad are we there yet?" Imagine that for the rest of your life...
He's got a point.

Plurp. We have invented a new Japanese meditative art: nano-Bonsai. The idea is to culture a single cell from a plant that most looks like the fully-grown version of that plant. Give it a try!

Plurp.
The blue dog
turned out to be
a Snickers bar
in a spandex suit

Friday, February 15, 2002
Blab. A reader, perhaps even a colleague at work, writes:
Cookies!!! Yum YUM!!!
Is this somehow connected to our bringing in to work yesterday Helen's beautiful and delicious Valentine cookies? Hmm.
Blab. A mathematically inventive reader suggests a format in which all dates are palindromic.
A proposed date format:
January 1st 2000 shall be denoted as "Musharraf." The day after shall be "I", the next day "II", and so on. The day before Musharraf is denoted "OIO", the previous day "OIIO", etc.
-pTang
We like it! But we'll have to make those little blanks on checks quite a bit longer.
By the way, are we correct that the most compact representation in which all dates are palindromic is the construct DD', where D' is the reverse of D, D is the number of days since some given date, and D is expressed in base n where n is large? (Or, perhaps better stated, the most compact representation, given that no number is the representation is in a base bigger than n, is DD'?)
All your base are belong to us.

Blab. A reader delights our sense of linguistic esthetics with a haiku.
Drive car with top down
Winter brings summer weather
Miata kata
We can hardly wait!

Blab. Referencing one of our better rants against dimwitted environmentalism, a reader writes:
Perhaps at your commencement address an opposing viewpoint could be given by an environmentalist. The title of his speech: "How To Not Change the World."
Hey - how about this? We could talk about how humans are inherently evil, how it's outrageous that humans change the environment, how thousands of years of history prove that humans are irredeemable in this regard, and how the obvious conclusion is that the graduating class be added to the mulch pile immediately, before they go out and do more harm.
Yeah, that's got possibilities!

Plop. There's a news report today that somebody cloned a cat, and you have to wonder: Why? Dear god.
We suspect a conspiracy on the part of the cats. Fix us?, we hear them say. We'll fix you!

Yow. A Lego Rubick's Cube solving robot? And even more amazing stuff here. Oh. My. God. (/usr/bin/girl)

Yak.
You're listening more carefully than I'm speaking!

Plop. The next time we're about to have sushi in bed, could someone please remind me that it's not actually necessary to finish every last piece if you ordered way too much and doing so would result in painful gorging? Thank you.

Plurp.
I kidnapped myself once. But, when I refused to pay the ransom, I was forced to shoot and then bury myself in shallow grave out by the lake.

Plurp.
The blue dog
often wondered what it would be like to
be a Valentine cookie on
February 15

Thursday, February 14, 2002
Blab. A reader imagines what it can do.
aspi ser nemon muspi
amus animul ,amus aiuq ainmo
It's all Greek to us.

Blab. A spammist writes:
This is a one-time mailing to persons identified as interested in training technology.
You will not receive another message from this site unless you subscribe.
If you want, you can actively remove your name by sending an email to Remove@elearningresource.com with the word Remove as the subject.
Huh?

Blab. Another spammist writes:
We strongly oppose the use of SPAM email and do not want anyone who does not wish to receive our mailings to receive them. As a result, we have retained the services of an independent 3rd party to administer our list management and remove list.
This is not SPAM.
If you do not wish to receive further mailings, please click remove and enter your email at the top of the page. You may then rest-assured that you will never receive another email from us again.
We would wager, however, that their independent 3rd party would happily sell our email address to everyone else in the world.

Blab. A missive arrives that might possibly be related to that ongoing discussion of palindromic dates and their worrying absenses.
Oooh, yes, he's got me bang to rights guvnor. It is indeed. But again only if you don't have a sucky calendar :) -AJL
We might guess that our reader is British. Or doing a bad imitation thereof.

Blab. A reader aids us in our humanitarian work.
I have an answerphone message to add to your collection:
"S & Hs answerphone is broken; this is their refrigerator. Please speak slowly and I'll write your message down on one of these post-it notes and stick it to myself."
We love it! And so recorded.

Blab. A reader accuses us.
Grognard!
Guilty as charged, though we generally prefer first-person shooters.

Blab. A reader reports a revolting trend.
Chicken fat!
As in University of Georgia using chicken fat to heat campus. It makes us wonder what they use to filter their water. Ick.

Blab. A reader from some other blog somehow sees fit to report on it to us.
Ian's Reader seems to have confused vultures with the canonical eagles.
Not to mention the hummingbirds, eh?

Blab. Helen writes:
LOVE YOU!![Unable to display image]
We're not sure whether we should be disappointed or relieved. Or both.

Yow. Happy Chinese New Year, Mardi Gras and Valentine's Day. Pretty much all at once.

Yow. Now here's a Valentine's Day site that we really like. We especially like the Flowers option because, well, you'll see. (Many more here.) (/usr/bin/girl)

Plop. From our rather fat file labeled Is Nothing Sacred comes this.
The FBI has issued an alert to 350 law enforcement agencies in the southwest and Salt Lake City for potential Valentine teddy bear bombs after a suspicious transaction at a Wal-Mart last month.
Teddy bear bombs? OK, folks. That's enough. You can stop now.

Plurp. Watching the Olympics, we wonder why French seems to be the official language of the event. We speculate that it's because the French don't want to admit that they all speak English, and the English-speaking countries are too embarassed to object. We don't actually know this, but it is consistent with all of the cultural data that we have.

Yow. The Brain Museum. Brains, brains and more brains! (Bill)

Plop. In one of the best examples of Doublethink to date ...
Launching his defense against war crimes charges, Slobodan Milosevic on Thursday sought to justify his actions in the Balkans as a "struggle against terrorism" [...].
He also denied having known about prison camps in Bosnia where thousands of Muslims and Croats were tortured and killed and said he tried to stop Bosnian Serbs from targeting civilians.
It's hard to add to that, isn't it?

Plop. Kenneth Lay and his lovely wife have fallen on hard times, now that Kenny's financial mischief at Enron has been exposed for all to see. We've lost everything, says lovely wife.
Former Enron chairman Kenneth Lay and his wife have sold a house for $10 million, fetching the highest price per square foot that real estate agents can remember in this haven for the rich and famous.
The Lays, who have three other Aspen properties for sale, paid $1.9 million in 1991 for the 3,015-square-foot house on a three-acre lot, part of which fronts the Roaring Fork River.
Well, maybe not everything.

Plurp.
The blue dog
was what was left
after heating the
campus with
chicken fat

Wednesday, February 13, 2002
Blab. A hallucinogenic reader, mistaking the Blab box for either a search facility or a giraffe, writes:
Triscuit basketball
barbiturate womble
We encourage drug-free blogging, at least for you.

Blab. A reader takes issue with the assertion of some other reader.
"And because the clock only goes up to 23.59, it is something that will never happen again."
21:12 on December 21, 2112
Lamar
And a ternary triple as well! We confidently predict the end of the world.

Blab. Obsessed with palindromic timestamps, a reader writes:
20:02, 20/02, 2002 is nice...
We could also point out that there was a major numeric nuisance on at 11:11 on 11/11 of 1111. We Americans (or, at least, the Natives that were here at the time) could have also celebrated 12:21, 12/21, 1221 if you use our date format. It was, alas, the last for us Americans, since there are only 12 months. However, with the advances in science and aging, the majority of people alive today may actually alive in 2112; it's only, after all, 110 years from now. On December 21st, at just after nine p.m., it will be 21:12, 21/12, 2112, in the euro format. I think it's time to go. Too much of this and I'll get a nervous tick. Tock.
--RAO
We propose changing the date format so that every date is palindromic. Or the name of the President of Pakistan.

Blab. A reader has located some odd artifacts of modern culture.
Touch me
Ahhhvacado!
These being curious juxtapositions of proposed Atari arcade games with women too old to be interested in them. We wonder what this means.
(Ahhhvacado, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain ...)

Blab. Referencing the referenced furbag, a reader writes:
"The referenced furbag is not, as far as we know, a being of supreme evil. He might aspire to becoming a being of mediocre evil, but we don't think he even aspires to that."
Perhaps He Whose Name Comes Before 'Aanonsen' And After 'Zzuccero' In The Phone Book is a familiar to Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light.
We prefer to think of him as the Prince of Dimness. But maybe that's the same thing.

Blab. A reader thinks.
Dave seems to have pinched a load of safety and road signs. I think you should have a word.
We do. And that word is: Avocado.

Yow. Ian gets the award for Most Drug-Induced Meandering Blog Entry O' The Year. Go, Ian!

Plurp. On the topic of Certain Regularities.
The voices.
A dog.
Things that have no name.
Mind control lasers.
Sluttony.
Dubya.
Readers.
Zen.
Helen.
Chinese spam.
Cthulhu.
Forbidden texts inscribed on the eyelids of virgins.
Brussel sprouts.
John Ashcroft.
Google.
Number One.
Princess Bride.
Bozo.
Developers, developers, developers, developers.
Canned beets.

Plurp. If you pulled down the Properties menu from the phrase You're only as old as you think you are and selected More like this, what other manifestly false aphorisms would appear? Well, we tried it, and here's what we got.

You're only as tall as you think you are

You're only as smart as you think you are

You're only as well-dressed as you think you are

You're only as bald as you think you are

And our personal favorite:

You're only as funny as you think you are

Yak. From a meeting today, making perfect sense in context.
... he's a manager raised by wolves ...

Plurp. If only we could write backwards in Latin, just think of what we could accomplish.

Plurp.
The blue dog
is only as old
as you think you are

Tuesday, February 12, 2002
Blab. Taking us up on an ancient reader challenge, a reader writes:
I don't know about the Tokyo water Park but go to WebShots and look at the photo of the Miyazaki, Japan --- Ocean Dome!
This is an entirely frightening concept. Soon, all natural experiences will be encapsulated, mechanized and recreated in fantasy parks. But we will not give in. Not us! We will wait until they are available online.

Blab. On our recent chess game, a reader writes:
1.   ---   Resigns
An interesting game. The only winning game is not to play. How about a nice game of Global Thermonuclear War?
No thanks. Too easy.

Blab. A masterful reader writes:
1.   ---   Resigns
If only all of my opponents were as wise as Plurp!
And didn't go first, we presume.

Blab. On the topic of On the game, a reader suggests:
See also "in the life"
This suggests that On the life and In the game are both Helenisms. But we dare not eat these strawberries with cream.

Blab. An authoritative reader exclaims:
Happy Chinese New Mardi Gras!
Gung Hey, Fat Man.

Blab. On the extremely obscure topic of the math consultant to the movie A Beautiful Mind, a reader drops names like crazy.
Dave Bayer is a nut, but he did a nice job on ABM. According to him (after N bottles of wine in San Diego last month), his job was mostly to keep anything blatantly stupid from appearing onscreen. There was lots of math (for instance, on the windows) that had nothing to do with what Nash did, but looked pretty and was indistinguishable to the audience. He even threw in a ring, for no good reason. (He also had a cameo in the movie, in the pen scene, which he'd be delighted to tell you about. Makes for a good story, if you can get past the constant references to "Ron" and "Russ".)
G
We still want you to ask him about that relativistic number theory gaffe. Honestly!

Blab. A reader lets us in on its cryptic internal dialog.
Jamie?
You need to dial one before you dial this number.
I need to dial one? Before I dial 888?
Is it a toll free number?
Um, yes......
Then you need to dial one
Oh......
No, one.

Blab. As if being in the midst of a triple of trinary dates weren't enough to reduce us to spittly gibbering, a reader feels the necessity of revealing this horror.
Believe it or not but 8.02pm on February 20 this year will be an historic moment in time.
It will not be marked by the chiming of any clocks or the ringing of bells, but at that precise time, on that specific date, something will happen which has not occurred for 1,001 years and will never happen again.
As the clock ticks over from 8.01pm on Wednesday, February 20, time will, for sixty seconds only, read in perfect symmetry 2002, 2002, 2002, or to be more precise - 20:02, 20/02, 2002.
This historic event will never have the same poignancy as the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month which marks Armistice Day, but it is an event which has only ever happened once before, and is something which will never be repeated.
The last occasion that time read in such a symmetrical pattern was long before the days of the digital watch and the 24-hour clock - at 10.01am on January 10, 1001.
And because the clock only goes up to 23.59, it is something that will never happen again.
(Anon - my mate Ken sent it to me)
But of course it only works if you don't have a sucky US calendar. So nyah-nyah ne nyah nyah as we used to say when I was five.
-AJL
This can only signify the violent rending of flesh, the shredding of the organs of the still living, the terror of all that we know ripped from the firmament of nature before eyes that know without time to react that we are next.
As we used to say when we were five.

Blab. In spite of the above, a reader asks:
How can you have non accurate real numbers? It's an oxymoron, like "military intelligence" -AJL
We give up. Except for the difference between "precise" and "accurate", which we seem to recall are spelled differently.

Blab. In preparation for certain death, a reader issues this plaintive cry.
Please post more pictures of Him Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken. For a being of supreme evil, he sure is cute!
The referenced furbag is not, as far as we know, a being of supreme evil. He might aspire to becoming a being of mediocre evil, but we don't think he even aspires to that. Most of the time, we don't even think of him as evil, per se. He is simply driven by bestial and fetish desires that we do not wish to comprehend in any detail. Or at all.

Yo. BT says they own a patent on hyperlinks. So, basically, we're all under arrest.

Yow. Sunset from terrace.

Yak.
I need another cookie.
No, you don't.
What?
No. You don't.
Maybe you didn't understand me.
That's always possible.
I need another cookie.
You do?
Yes.
You know what I like about our relationship?
What's that?
I learn something new about you almost every day.
What did you learn today?
That you need another cookie.

Plurp. We apologize for the utter lack of Original Content. We blame it on (1) Our current Secret Project, about which more when we're done, and (2) Something else; we're not sure what.

Plurp.
While the blue dog
slept, the parrot filled
itself with brightly
colored machine parts.

Monday, February 11, 2002
Blab. An authoritative reader gives us the last word on:
Re: 'on the game'.
When one is 'on the game', one is a prostitute. I confess, as I thought this expression was American in origin; however, a random sampling of one American (from the immediately available population of ... well, one American) suggests that it's not :).
[inw]
We accept your expertise as definitive.

Blab. An extremely confused reader writes:
Ian's not THAT British is he? He's from New York, after all.
Uh ...

Blab. A reader makes up an authoritative-sounding story.
RE: A Beautiful Mind
The AAAS has an article in volume 295 of Science Magazine (pages 789 through 791, if you can get it) about the mathematics in ABM. The link is this, but I think you need to be an AAAS member to get in.
In summary, Ron Howard utilized the resources of NYC's Barnard College algebraic geometer Daver Bayer to develop the mathematics and formulas that would have been appropriate for the movie. The numbers are real, even if they aren't entirely accurate.
Scary when Hollywood actually does something right.
-- RAO
Cool. We do wonder, however, about the statement (in the movie) that number theory needs to be revised in light of general relativity. Ooh! English words! What could that mean?

Blab. A reader challenges us to a game of chess.
1. d4
After considerable and unprecedented calculation, which there is too little room to reproduce here, we have determined that the optimal response is:
1. ---   Resigns
Thanks for a good game.

Blab. Paying rare attention to recent events, a reader writes:
Regarding the alleged (yeah, right) sexual abuse of children in the Boston area by Catholic priests..... had this abuse happened in your local community by an elementary school teacher, he/she would have been hauled into the nearest police headquarters and booked. Holier-than-thou, huh?
The reader raises an interesting issue of ethical double standards. If this had happened so systematically in a school, the principal would have been up on charges as well as the teachers. If it had happened so systematically in a police department, the chief of police would have been in deep doo-doo. If it had happened amongst the senior management of almost any company besides Enron, the executives would have been Rooming With Bubba.
So how come the Cardinals and (dare we say it?) the Pope aren't up on charges of mismanagement, criminal negligence, or something that sounds equally officious?
We didn't realize that celibacy was so anti-human that it would lead to this, we hear them saying, despite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary.
Uh huh.

Blab. A reader writes:
Dr. Blue Dog has been overworked recently. Hey, give him a day off, would ya' huh?
The blue dog is still working on a Ph.D. and, as such, gets absolutely no time off whatsoever.

Plop. Why Graphics Programs Should Be Illegal, Part IV.

Plurp. Several readers wrote us about Helen's nuts. We appreciate the interest.

Yo. Why do we seem to be obsessed with Lego representations of popular culture? We have no idea. But here's ONE: A Space Odyssey, and The Making of ONE: A Space Odyssey. Pretty funny. (synthetic zero)

Yo. Stay tuned for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Viagra.

Plurp. Cats are control freaks. They are! They need to know everything there is to know about their environment, all the time.
Him Whose Name Rattles in the Mind of God is especially worked up about this. When we first got him, he spent several days walking back and forth between the two rooms that constitute our apartment, checking to make sure that nothing had changed in the last few seconds.
Naturally, he is compelled to sniff every new thing in the apartment. That goes without saying, even though we are convinced he has no sense of smell.
But it goes beyond that. He seems quietly outraged if we change anything. Anything at all.
He doesn't bite us, or even throw up on the expensive rug (well, not usually). But he does look at us suspiciously, wondering what we've done to disturb his nest.

Plurp. We're working on a new Secret Project. OK?

Plurp.
Between the allegations of
sexual misconduct and mistakes
in the proofs,
the blue dog
had a hard time concentrating on
...

Sunday, February 10, 2002
Blab. A Zen master writes:
"Aspirations. Why is the same word used for both desires and things we choke on?"
And, in the asking of it, the question was answered.
Lamar
We are enlightened.

Blab. Perhaps related to that claimed aphorism on the game, a reader suggests.
Ask Ian, he's British, and far brighter than I am. He'll explain it all to you. -AJL
Very well. Ian?

Plop. Another triple of trinary dates! Frog plagues in Egypt!

Yo. Unexpectedly, Helen is growing nuts. She grew two small ones so far, but they fell off. She says that one was rotten inside.

Yo. The world's speed skiing record is 155 mph. This is very fast.

Yak.
In this Olympics, she's got nothing to luge.

Plurp. Helen said today, several times and rather emphatically, that she was not a cat. We suspect she is telling the truth.

Yow. We finally saw A Beautiful Mind today (or, as a colleague at work keeps calling it, without realizing the humor, It's a Wonderful Life). It's a wonderful movie, and Russel Crowe as John Nash is quite, quite good, finally obliterating our image of him in that tedious loser, Gladiator.
This is, perhaps, the best movie portrayal of madness we've seen, told almost entirely first person in such a way that it seems rational rather than insane and, with Nash, we feel a little sad when he starts to realize that his delusions are just that; we long for the excitement and importance of that delusive world.
Oh, sure, all the math is fake, but it's good fake, as the nonmathematicians in the audience can tell the difference between Nash as a brilliant theorist and Nash as a paranoid schizophrenic.
The movie led to a discussion about the popular conception of a link between genius and madness. We know several very brilliant people who are a bit over the edge. But then, we know several very ordinary people who are a bit over the edge. We can imagine that there is a connection as Nash's ability to intuit order in complexity was connected with his ability to find the shape of any object you suggest in the stars, and his delusion that he was finding hidden order in the random events of life. Both the brilliant and the mad defy convention and think they have discovered great new truths. Of course, the former are often right and the latter are usually wrong.
So is it just that they both seem a little odd, saying they see things that ordinary people cannot, but the similarity goes no further? Or is there some deeper cognitive sameness, some ability to go beyond conventional limits in breathtaking leaps?
Yeah, we know all about Van Gough and all the rest. But can any among our readers point us to real research on the subject?

Plurp.
The blue dog
turned out to be
a triple of
trinary dates

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