Regruntled.com

Starts off slow, but give it a chance. Performed by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain,

Generate your very own evil clown image at Scottsmind.com.  Just the thing for those Monday mornings when you wake up thinking “I’d really like to draw an evil clown!  If only I could find a web site to help me do it.”  I have mornings like that.  Don’t you?

Here is a red-winged blackbird hitching a ride on a red-tailed hawk.  Or, more likely, harassing a hawk that got too close to the blackbird’s nest.  The story behind the photo is here.

Here is a guy who runs a games-by-email service and needs random numbers.  Lots of them.  So he built an automatic dice roller that rolls dice, runs them past a video camera, and reads the results.  1.3 million rolls a day.

Generating random numbers is a hard problem, and there are some philosophical issues (determinism, etc.) as to whether a series of numbers is “truly random”.  On the other hand, all sorts of information is available, and there are even hardware gadgets that you can plug into a PC that will generate random numbers from things like thermal noise in resistors.  There are open source statistical programs that will test your data for randomness.

My view is that “random is as random does”.  If the data passes the statistical tests for randomness, it’s random, even if it “really” came from a deterministic  source.  If the data doesn’t pass the statistical tests, it’s not random, even if it came from a “truly random” quantum source.

Mr. Dice-O-Matic seems to be blissfully unaware of the state of the art.  He’s put all his effort into building his contraption and none (as far as I can tell) into testing the output.  How random are his dice rolls?  No one knows, because he didn’t test them.  His policy:

There is no doubt that I will still receive complaints about the rolls, but now I can honestly say I have done all that I can possibly do: the rolls you get are exactly as random as those you would get throwing by hand. As I promised earlier, if you donate to the site and are unhappy about the rolls, let me know and I will pull a die out of the machine, melt it flat and mail it to you, as an object lesson to the other dice.

Rich in the cations of a soft silvery-white metallic alkali element!

I saw the above equation on the net. Is this really true? Yes, it’s easy enough to verify. Are there any other oddities like this? This is a much harder question. Sounds like a job for Wolfram Alpha! Alpha is the new and much-hyped “computational knowledge engine”. It’s not always easy to ask Alpha a question that it can answer, but when you do, the results are impressive. In this case, it turns out that 666 / 34780 = (6 * 6 * 6) / (3 * 47 * 80).

This is an interesting art form.  On a platform like YouTube, the artist could be edited out, and the result would be just another form of animation.  With the artist left in, it’s performance art, and there are all these little moments of “what’s that… wait… oh, now I see”.  The viewer is not exactly part of the art, but the artist’s performance elicits a parallel process in the viewer’s brain.  The viewer’s discovery follows the artist’s creation.  I’d like to see a live performance, with the images projected on a large screen in front of an audience.

See also: Sand art video.

I keep getting into this recurring argument about software projects: there will be some kind of problem, and someone will say “we can fix this by adding another table to the database and adding a few more buttons to the user interface.”  I will say, “no, no, we can’t fix this by making the system more complicated, we have to fix it by making the system simpler!”  I typically lose the argument.  The system becomes more complicated, which leads to additional problems, which are addressed by adding even more complexity.  And so it goes.

Mouse’s piece on Practical Demonology got me to thinking about this in relation to religion, which, after all, is cultural software.  Monotheism is very simple, which I like.  Nice, minimalist design.  And yet, complexity creeps back into Catholicism:

• The hierarchy of angels: Raphael, the archangel in charge of healing.
• Demonology: Leonard or “Master Leonard” is a demon or spirit in the Dictionnaire Infernal, Grand-master of the nocturnal orgies of demons.
• Patron saints: St. Gertrude of Nivelles, invoked against fever, rats, and mice, particularly field-mice.

While I’m at it, let me mention the proliferation of superheros with obscure powers, as opposed to the simple, all-purpose Superman.

Ragbag has a peculiar sense of humor.  The author says:

i’m a wack-ademic and an illetist. i majored in nomenclature.