Science/Technology blog

In my last post on the surreals, I introduced how the surreal numbers are constructed. It’s really fascinating to look back on it - to see the structure of numbers from 0 to infinity and beyond, and realize that ultimately, that it’s all built from nothing but the empty set!

Today, we’re going to move on, and start looking at arithmetic with the surreal numbers. In this post, I’m going to go through the basic definition of addition, subtraction, and multiplication of surreal numbers. Division will have to wait for a later post; division is quite a subtle operation in the surreals.

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Ransom Myers had a habit of telling people what they didn’t want to hear. In the 1990s, his employers in the Canadian government didn’t like it when he told them overfishing was to blame for the collapse of the northern cod stocks. Three years ago it was the U.S. federal government, in a classic example of its anti-science bias, that removed his recommendations on the importance of habitat protection from a report on west coast salmon stocks. But he kept telling it like it is. Until a brain tumor finally got the best of him on March 27.

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There’s a nice article about former Princeton coach Pete Carril and the motion offense popularly associated with his teams:

Carril has not been a college coach for 11 years. But he is wearing a Georgetown cap, and people keep calling to talk about the precise pass-and-cut offense that he supposedly invented but never called the Princeton offense.

“I didn’t call it anything,” he said.

To him, it is only basketball, and it is not complicated. Carril does not understand why no one talks about other offenses the way they do about Princeton’s. But people are calling him, and they are suddenly curious, as if there is some mystery to be unearthed, a round-ball archeological dig looking for the key to Georgetown’s success.

He’s right, of course– the “Princeton offense” is just basketball, and the basic idea is pretty simple: you never stop moving. It’s devastating when it’s done well. Or even not that well– I used to play occasionally with my friend Dave in college, and he was astonishingly effective for a guy with no significant talent for the game beyond an ability to hit a wide-open two-hand set shot. You woul;dn’t think that would get you very far, but he used to literally run in circles around the three-point line, never stopping, until his man would get fed up with chasing him and drop back into the middle. And then, next thing you know, he would be wide open, hitting that goddamn set shot…

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According to this creationist video, peanut butter, which has been subjected to high temperatures to render it sterile, disproves that life can come from non-life. The silliness of this argument reminds me of Kirk Cameron’s ‘banana proof’ of creationism.

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Leave it to the British to suggest bringing civility to blogging, specifically in blog comment threads, with a call for a suggested code of conduct. This follows blogger Kathy Sierra receiving vulgar and graphic death threats on her and others’ blogs. (Kathy writes the techie blog, Creating Passionate Users.). As a result, Sierra canceled her appearances this week at a San Diego tech conference.

Citing a post from Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, Inc. about this disturbing episode, Jack Schofield of the UK Guardian’s Technology Blog notes that The Guardian has adopted a new comments policy:

By posting on this website you are agreeing to abide by our talk policy. We will remove posts that contain racist, sexist or offensive/threatening language, personal attacks on the writer or other posters, posts that exceed the maximum length, and posts that are off topic. Any poster who repeatedly contravenes the talk policy will be banned from posting on the website.

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Jason drove down to Knoxville and attended an ID-Creationist “conference” and lived to tell about it. And tell he did, in five installments:

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

All the usual suspects were there and all the usual nonsense was spouted, but the most interesting part was the Subway-line conversation Jason had (in Part Four), debating a handful of attendees and noticing age-difference in their thought-processes and debating strategies.

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Awhile back, I posted about a nutty thing Eric Keroack said: PRE-MARITALSEX is really MODERN GERM WARFARE…

Now we find that he has resigned.  But it was not underhonorable circumstances.  

MassHealthstatus of ex-HHS head eyed

State probes case a few years old

ByAlan Wirzbicki, Globe Correspondent

March 31, 2007

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Circus of the Spineless #19 is up at Burning Silo.

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Well, Skatje’s going to Minicon next weekend—sending her off to hang out with intelligent nerds and geeks and people like Charles deLint and Lois McMaster Bujold and the Nielsen Haydens and Jane Yolen is probably the most responsible thing a parent can do. If any of my readers are also going, make sure she doesn’t just go hide in her room and knit or chat on the computer. She needs to get out and socialize! Make friends! Watch Dr Who! Something!

Unfortunately, although I’ll be providing the shuttle service to get her to and from the con, I’m going to be swamped with work for the next few weeks and just can’t afford to take the weekend off. I’ll probably get a day pass and hang out on Friday evening for a while, though, before Skatje shoos me away. Next year, though, I’m going to plan my calendar a little better and see the whole thing.

So my daughter gets to go to Minicon and she probably won’t even get me a lousy t-shirt.

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With Kerwin Brown inert for nearly three months and “Christ Matters” erased from the Web, Nathan Bradfield, who blogs in favor of the standard slate of wingnut causes in a loose rotation, has become a natural target of anti-nonsense posts. He runs his blog like something of a Ponzi scheme: He’ll write something laughably ill-informed, and by the time about fifty commenters have applied desultory rhetorical sledgehammers and reduced his arguments to dust, he’s already moved on to the next ignorant outburst. By continually generating brand-new lies, he can avoid answering direct criticism of those that are merely very recent.

Today he tries to explain why Democrats (all of whom are elitist snobs who constitute 100 percent of the war opposition, apparently) need to support the goings-on in Iraq, and in so doing explains precisely why there’s little reason to support them at all. He offers a video made by a soldier who was killed in November, one who claimed he loved being in Iraq and bonding with the locals.

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