2011 book poll
Here's what I've been reading over the past year!

( This got long...Collapse )

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correct horse battery staple -- the sequel
So, I was thinking about this comic. Four random words makes a great password when there aren't any length limitations, but that's often not the case. The obvious workaround is to shorten "correct horse battery staple" to "corhorbatsta", but if you're not careful you could lose a lot of entropy that way.

Here is a comma-separated list of a little over 2000 words, culled from the top 14000 in wiktionary's film/TV script list. Each has a unique three-letter prefix (except for the ones that are shorter than three characters long, where you can pad them out to something unique), so if you pick four random words off the list and shorten them each to their first three letters, you'll get a 12-character password with 44 bits of entropy that should hopefully be reasonably easy to remember.

Some specific notes:
1) For words that contain apostrophes in their first three characters, the prefix is unique whether you include the apostrophe or not.
2) I've done some hand-culling, mostly to remove really weird stuff (like "qfxmjrie", which appears in the wiktionary word list and nowhere else on the internet; presumably someone's cat jumped on their keyboard while they were compiling the list or something) as well as some alternate spellings of things like "okay"; if I've missed anything like that, I'd like to know about it.
3) I have however left in words that are probably made the list mostly because they show up a lot in one specific show or movie ("lebowski", "vader", "doh", "jaffa", "ziegler") as well as proper names in general.
4) The list is in no way bowdlerized.

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Ashland 2011
We saw the following plays:

( Love's Labours LostCollapse )

( The Imaginary InvalidCollapse )

( Measure For MeasureCollapse )

( Julius CaesarCollapse )

( The Pirates of PenzanceCollapse )

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enormity
So far as I can piece together from the OED, the story is this:

1. Initially, "enormous" and "enormity" both had strongly negative connotations. (They have roughly corresponding etymologies, though "enormous" comes directly from Latin and "enormity" comes via French.)
2. Over time, they came to be associated with very big things; this happened somewhat earlier for "enormous" than "enormity".
3. Something happened around 1850 to make the OED decide that any use of "enormity" to mean "bigness" after that time was a usage error. By 1890, there's a citation of it as a usage error from a dictionary, so the idea that "enormity" can only mean "heinousness" was well-entrenched by then.

My question: does anyone know what that something was? Was there an organic decline in the use of "enormity" to mean "bigness", or did someone (who?) just decide to make a shibboleth out of it, and it propagated?

On some level I have trouble believing in the descriptive version of what's happening here (people just stopped using "enormity" to mean "bigness"), because even 150 years later people are still complaining about it, whereas nobody ever complains about people using the Austen definition of "sensitivity".

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stuff about polynomials
So, I think of the following things as being standard high-school fare:

1. Synthetic division
2. Finding all the rational roots of a polynomial with integer coefficients by factoring its leading and trailing terms.

Ariel doesn't.

Which one of us do you guys think is right?

Complicating factors include:

a) There was one year of math that I learned out of a textbook. So if it was covered in that book, I probably learned it whether or not I was really supposed to (unless I thought it was hard at the time -- I seem to recall getting stuck on its explanation of matrix multiplication, for example) and mentally filed it under "stuff people learn in that class".
b) Ariel's high school algebra was kind of spotty, so she might not have learned it even if it was standard.

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2010 books read
I'm not going to finish another book today, so have a reading poll!

( cut for lengthCollapse )

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my annoyed realization of the day
It's not actually possible to compute degrees of consanguinity with an ammeter.

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some moderately absurd nitpicking
1. The frame story of the Arabian Nights is set "at the time of the Sasanid dynasty" (224-651) -- i.e., sometime before the rise of Islam. A bunch of the internal stories mention Islam or are set during the reign of the caliph Harun al-Rashid (786-809). Are we to conclude that Shahrazad is a time-traveler?
2. It takes me almost exactly three minutes to read the first night aloud. Even supposing that English is a more compact language than... whatever it is we're supposed to imagine they're speaking (the manuscript is in Arabic, the frame story is set in India, and all the names in it are Persian), and taking into account the fact that there's definitely more going on that night than storytelling, that makes the timing seem awfully precise. Did she know to start telling her story ten minutes before sunrise? Surely it makes more sense for her to have started a few hours earlier...

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Am I imagining things?
Or did LJ's clickbox quizzes used to report results as a percentage of the number of people voting, rather than as a percentage of the votes received?

It certainly makes a lot more sense than what they're doing now...

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random thought of the day
Someone who does themed movie nights (i.e., not me) should do a "movies that are better than Citizen Kane" night, including How Green Was My Valley and Chimes At Midnight. I'm not sure if there's an obvious third movie; I suppose you could cop out and watch Citizen Kane itself.

Of course, this requires finding a copy of Chimes At Midnight...

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dear lazyweb,
Now that bloglines is disappearing, what RSS aggregator should I use?

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I now have something else to search used book stores for
This has to be the best edition of Northanger Abbey ever. Sadly, none of Amazon, Powells, Abebooks, and Alibris seem to sell it.

Ariel thinks it needs to go on a bookshelf next to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies et al.

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this sounds like a riddle, but it's a serious question
What lives in the midwest, is roughly the size and shape of a mouse, and moves by jumping?

(I'd like to imagine that I was just the first person ever to observe the rare American Miniature Dwarf Kangaroo in the wild, but it seems unlikely...)

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RVP
Anyone who has reason to be fond of the murder of the Duke of Clarence really ought to check this video out.

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Stratford
I just realized that this has been sitting on my hard drive since I got back on Sunday. Since we're moving tomorrow and likely to be internet-less until Tuesday, I figure I should probably post it now, even though I think I'd originally been planning on saying a little more...

Last weekend, we went to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival with my family. We saw:

( Thursday afternoon: Two Gentlemen of VeronaCollapse )

( Friday afternoon: The Winter's TaleCollapse )

( Friday evening: The TempestCollapse )

( Saturday afternoon: As You Like ItCollapse )

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shockingly, Google doesn't give me any hits that suggest someone else has thought of these
"These are the best asymptotes ever!" said Tom hyperbolically.

"I seem to have trouble maintaining a single focus," said Tom elliptically.

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overnegation alert!
"...Apple officials denied that an email purportedly sent by chief executive Steve Jobs on the subject of the iPhone 4's antenna problems was a fake."

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*lightbulb*
"Eeyore" is onamatopoeic!

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Dear people who are more familiar with FPS engines than I,
Is there any way to turn arbitrary objects upside down in Portal that doesn't involve portal shenanigans?

(This question is brought to you by the Department of That One Puzzle I Solved With an Office Chair Where the Walkthrough I Looked At Afterwards Used a Cube.)

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someone is wrong not-on the Internet
This article (which I've seen linked to in a couple places, none of which normally write about UK politics) is clearly wrong-headed--it wants you to conclude "since 16000 votes is an extremely small fraction of the electorate, the Conservative Party was extremely close to attaining a majority", but that doesn't follow at all unless there was some a priori reason to single out those 16000 votes.

It's interesting to think about about precisely what that statistic is saying, though. If you want to shift $d$ seats in an $n$-seated parliament, with a total electorate of size $E$, dimensional analysis says you should typically expect to need to shift on the order of $(d/n)^2*E/2$ votes[*]. Setting $d=19$, $n=650$, and $E=2.5*10^7$, we see that the expected shift is something like 11000 votes--that is, if anything it looks like the Conservatives need to flip slightly more votes than you'd expect given how far they are from a majority seat-wise.

Deriving a more rigorously justified version of this formula is a semi-interesting calculus exercise. If I've done my math right, the only extra factor that shows up--if you're talking about the average number of votes you need to shift to get some smallish number of constituencies over any threshold percentage--is essentially the difference in percentages between your best and worst constituency, and thus is less than 1. Of course, the median voter theorem implies that the threshold of "winning the seat" is probably not a typical one, but dealing properly with that would require actual data, and it probably wouldn't fit on the back of this envelope.

[*] The graph of the relevant votes is triangle-shaped, which why I'm throwing in a factor of 2 even though this is obtained through dimensional analysis.

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