# The Universe of Discourse

Tue, 16 Jan 2018

If I were in charge of keeping plutonium out of the wrong hands, I would still worry about [people extracting it from plutonium-fueled pacemakers].

This turns out to be no worry at all. The isotope in the pacemaker batteries is Pu-238, which is entirely unsuitable for making weapons. Pu-238 is very dangerous, being both radioactive and highly poisonous, but it is not fissile. In a fission chain reaction, an already-unstable atomic nucleus is hit by a high-energy neutron, which causes it to fragment into two lighter nuclei. This releases a large amount of nuclear binding energy, and more neutrons which continue the reaction. The only nuclei that are unstable enough for this to work have an odd number of neutrons (for reasons I do not understand), and Pu-238 does not fit the bill (Z=94, N=144). Plutonium fission weapons are made from Pu-241 (N=147), and this must be carefully separated from the Pu-238, which tends to impede the chain reaction. Similarly, uranium weapons are made from U-235, and this must be painstakingly extracted from the vastly more common U-238 with high-powered centrifuges.

But I did not know this when I spent part of the weekend thinking about the difficulties of collecting plutonium from pacemakers, and discussing it with a correspondent. It was an interesting exercise, so I will publish it anyway.

While mulling it over I tried to identify the biggest real risks, and what would be the most effective defenses against them. An exercise one does when considering security problems is to switch hats: if I were the bad guy, what would I try? What problems would I have to overcome, and what measures would most effectively frustrate me? So I put on my Black Hat and tried to think about it from the viewpoint of someone, let's call him George, who wants to build a nuclear weapon from pacemaker batteries.

I calculated (I hope correctly) that a pacemaker had around 0.165 mg of plutonium, and learned online that one needs 4–6 kg to make a plutonium bomb. With skill and experience one can supposedly get this down to 2 kg, but let's take 25,000 pacemakers as the number George would need. How could he get this much plutonium?

(Please bear in mind that the following discussion is entirely theoretical, and takes place in an imaginary world in which plutonium-powered pacemakers are common. In the real world, they were never common, and the last ones were manufactured in 1974. And this imaginary world exists in an imaginary universe in which plutonium-238 can sustain a chain reaction.)

Obviously, George's top target would be the factory where the pacemakers are made. Best of all is to steal the plutonium before it is encapsulated, say just after it has been delivered to the factory. But equally obviously, this is where the security will be the most concentrated. The factory is not as juicy a target as it might seem at first. Plutonium is radioactive and toxic, so they do not want to have to store a lot of it on-site. They will have it delivered as late as possible, in amounts as small as possible, and use it up as quickly as possible. The chances of George getting a big haul of plutonium by hitting the factory seem poor.

Second-best is for George to steal the capsules in bulk before they are turned into pacemakers. Third-best is for him to steal cartons of pacemakers from the factory or from the hospitals they are delivered to. But bulk theft is not something George can pull off over and over. The authorities will quickly realize that someone is going after pacemakers. And after George's first heist, everyone will be looking for him.

If the project gets to the point of retrieving pacemakers after they are implanted, George's problems multiply enormously. It is impractical to remove a pacemaker from of a living subject. George would need to steal them from funeral homes or crematoria. These places are required to collect the capsules for return to Oak Ridge, and conceivably might sometimes have more than one on hand at a time, but probably not more than a few. It's going to be a long slog, and it beggars belief that George would be able to get enough pacemakers this way without someone noticing that something was up.

The last resort is for George to locate people with pacemakers, murder, and dissect them. Even if George somehow knows whom to kill, he'd have to be Merlin to arrange the murder of 25,000 people without getting caught. Merlin doesn't need plutonium; he can create nuclear fireballs just by waving his magic wand.

If George does manage to collect the 25,000 capsules, his problems get even worse. He has to open the titanium capsules, already difficult because they are carefully made to be hard to open — you wouldn't want the plutonium getting out, would you? He has to open them without spilling the plutonium, or inhaling it, or making any sort of mess while extracting it. He has to do this 25,000 times without messing up, and without ingesting the tiniest speck of plutonium, or he is dead.

He has to find a way to safely store the plutonium while he is accumulating it. He has to keep it hidden not only from people actively looking for him — and they will be, with great yearning — but also from every Joe Blow who happens to be checking background radiation levels in the vicinity.

And George cannot afford to take his time and be cautious. He is racing against the clock, because every 464 days, 1% of his accumulated stock, however much that is, will turn into U-234 and be useless. The more he accumulates, the harder it is to keep up. If George has 25,000 pacemakers in a warehouse, ready for processing, one pacemaker-worth of Pu-238 will be going bad every two days.

In connection with this, my correspondent brought up the famous case of the Radioactive Boy Scout, which I had had in mind. (The RBS gathered a recklessly large amount of americium-241 from common household smoke detectors.) Ignoring again the unsuitability of americium for fission weapons (an even number of neutrons again), the project is obviously much easier. At the very least, you can try calling up a manufacturer of smoke alarms, telling them you are building an apartment complex in Seoul, and that you need to bulk-order 2,000 units or whatever. You can rob the warehouse at Home Depot. You can even buy them online.

Sun, 14 Jan 2018

I woke up in the middle of the night wondering: Some people have implanted medical devices, such as pacemakers, that are plutonium-powered. How the hell does that work? The plutonium gets hot, but what then? You need electricity. Surely there is not a tiny turbine generator in there!

There is not, and the answer turns out to be really interesting, and to involve a bunch of physics I didn't know.

If one end of a wire is hotter than the other, electrons tend to diffuse from the hot end to the cold end; the amount of diffusion depends on the material and the temperature. Take two wires of different metals and join them into a loop. (This is called a thermocouple.) Make one of the joints hotter than the other. Electrons will diffuse from the hot joint to the cold joint. If there were only one metal, this would not be very interesting. But the electrons diffuse better through one wire (say wire A) than through the other (B), and this means that there will be net electron flow from the hot side down through wire A and then back up through B, creating an electric current. This is called the Seebeck effect. The potential difference between the joints is proportional to the temperature difference, on the order of a few hundred microvolts per kelvin. Because of this simple proportionality, the main use of the thermocouple is to measure the temperature difference by measuring the voltage or current induced in the wire. But if you don't need a lot of power, the thermocouple can be used as a current source.

In practice they don't use a single loop, but rather a long loop of alternating metals, with many junctions:

This is called a thermopile; when the heat source is radioactive material, as here, the device is called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG). The illustration shows the thermocouples strung out in a long line, but in an actual RTG you put the plutonium in a capsule and put the thermocouples in the wall of the capsule, with the outside joints attached to heat sinks. The plutonium heats up the inside joints to generate the current.

RTGs are more commonly used to power spacecraft, but there are a few dozen people still in the U.S. with plutonium-powered thermopile batteries in their pacemakers.

In pacemakers, the plutonium was sealed inside a titanium capsule, which was strong enough to survive an accident (such as a bullet impact or auto collision) or cremation. But Wikipedia says the technique was abandoned because of worries that the capsule wouldn't be absolutely certain to survive a cremation. (Cremation temperatures go up to around 1000°C; titanium melts at 1668°C.) Loose plutonium in the environment would be Very Bad.

(I wondered if there wasn't also worry about plutonium being recovered for weapons use, but the risk seems much smaller: you need several kilograms of plutonium to make a bomb, and a pacemaker has only around 135 mg, if I did the conversion from curies correctly. Even so, if I were in charge of keeping plutonium out of the wrong hands, I would still worry about this. It does not seem totally out of the realm of possibility that someone could collect 25,000 pacemakers. Opening 25,000 titanium capsules does sound rather tedious.)

Earlier a completely different nuclear-powered pacemaker was tried, based on promethium-powered betavoltaics. This is not a heat-conversion process. Instead, a semiconductor does some quantum physics magic with the electrons produced by radioactive beta decay. This was first demonstrated by Henry Moseley in 1913. Moseley is better-known for discovering that atoms have an atomic number, thus explaining the periodic table. The periodic table had previously been formulated in terms of atomic mass, which put some of the elements in the wrong order. Scientists guessed they were in the wrong order, because the periodicity didn't work, but they weren't sure why. Moseley was able to compute the electric charge of the atomic nucleus from spectrographic observations. I have often wondered what else Moseley would have done if he had not been killed in the European war at the age of 27.

It took a while to gather the information about this. Several of Wikipedia's articles on the topic are not up to their usual standards. The one about the radioisotope thermoelectric generator is excellent, though.

Thermopile illustration is by FluxTeq (Own work) CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

[ Addendum 20180115: Commenters on Hacker News have pointed out that my concern about the use of plutonium in fission weapons is easily satisfied: the fuel in the batteries is Pu-238, which is not fissile. The plutonium to use in bombs is Pu-241, and indeed, when building a plutonium bomb you need to remove as much Pu-238 as possible, to prevent its non-fissile nuclei from interfering with the chain reaction. Interestingly, you can tell this from looking at the numbers: atomic nuclei with an odd number of neutrons are much more fissile than those with an even number. Plutonium is atomic number 94, so Pu-238 has an even number of neutrons and is not usable. The other isotope commonly used in fission is U-235, with 141 neutrons. I had planned to publish a long article today detailing the difficulties of gathering enough plutonium from pacemakers to make a bomb, but now I think I might have to rewrite it as a comedy. ]

[ Addendum 20170116: I published it anyway, with some editing. ]

Sun, 07 Jan 2018

Well, yesterday I wrote an article about the drinking contest in the Gylfaginning and specifically about what was in the horn. I was very pleased with it. In the article, I said several times:

Obviously, the horn was full of mead.

A couple of my Gentle Readers have gently pointed out that I was wrong, wrong, wrong. I am deeply embarrassed.

The punch line of the story is that the end of the horn is attached to the ocean, and Thor cannot empty it, because he is trying to drink the ocean. The horn is therefore not filled with mead; it is filled with seawater.

How could I make such a dumb mistake? As I mentioned, the version I read first as a child stated that the horn was full of milk. And as a child I wondered: how could the horn be full of milk if it was attached to the sea? I decided that whatever enchantment connected the horn to the sea also changed the water to milk as it came into the horn. Later, when I realized that the milk was a falsehood, I retained my idea that there was an enchantment turning the seawater into something else.

But there is nothing in the text to support this. The jötunns don't tell Thor that the horn is full of mead. Adam Sjøgren pointed out that if they had, Thor would have known immediately that something was wrong. But as the story is, they bring the horn, they say that even wimps can empty it in three draughts, and they leave it at that. Wouldn't Thor notice that he is not drinking mead (or milk)? I think certainly, and perhaps he is initially surprised. But he is in a drinking contest and this is what they have brought him to drink, so he drinks it. The alternative is to put down the horn and complain, which would be completely out of character.

And the narrator doesn't say, and mustn't, that the horn was full of mead, because it wasn't; that would be in impermissible deceit of the audience. (“Hey, wait, you told us before that the horn was full of mead!”)

I wrote:

The story does not say what was in the horn. Because why would they bother to say what was in the horn? It was obviously mead.

No, it's not. It's because the narrator wants us to assume it is obviously mead, and then to spring the surprise on us as it was sprung on Thor: it was actually the ocean. The way it is told is a clever piece of misdirection. The two translators I quoted picked up on this, and I completely misunderstood it.

I have mixed feelings about Neil Gaiman, but Veit Heller pointed out that Gaiman understood this perfectly. In his Norse Mythology he tells the story this way:

He raised the brimming horn to his lips and began to drink. The mead of the giants was cold and salty…

In yesterday's article I presented a fantasy of Marion French, the author of my childhood “milk” version, hearing Snorri tell the story:

“Utgarða-Loki called his skutilsveinn, and requested him to bring the penalty-horn that his hirðmen were wont to drink from…”

“Excuse me! Excuse me, Mr. Sturluson! Just what were they wont to drink from it?”

“Eh, what's that?”

”What beverage was in the horn?”

“Why, mead, of course. What did you think it was, milk?”

But this couldn't have been how it went down. I now imagine it was more like this:

“Excuse me! Excuse me, Mr. Sturluson! Just what were they wont to drink from it?”

“Shhh! I'm getting to that! Stop interrupting!”

Thanks again to Adam Sjøgren and Veit Heller for pointing out my error, and especially for not wounding my pride any more than they had to.

When I was a kid I had a book of “Myths and Legends of the Ages”, by Marion N. French. One of the myths was the story of Thor's ill-fated visit to Utgard. The jötunns of Utgard challenge Thor and Loki to various contests and defeat them all through a combination of talent and guile. In one of these contests, Thor is given a drinking horn and told that even the wimpiest of the jötunns is able to empty it of its contents in three drinks. (The jötunns are lying. The pointy end of the horn has been invisibly connected to the ocean.)

The book specified that the horn was full of milk, and as a sweet and innocent kiddie I did not question this. Decades later it hit me suddenly: no way was the horn filled with milk. When the mighty jötunns of Utgard are sitting around in their hall, they do not hold contests to see who can drink the most milk. Obviously, the horn was full of mead.

The next sentence I wrote in the draft version of this article was:

   In the canonical source material (poetic edda maybe?) the horn is full
of *mead*. Of course it is.


In my drafts, I often write this sort of bald statement of fact, intending to go back later and check it, and perhaps produce a citation. As the quotation above betrays, I was absolutely certain that when I hunted down the original source it would contradict Ms. French and say mead. But I have now hunted down the canonical source material (in the Prose Edda, it turns out, not the Poetic one) and as far as I can tell it does not say mead!

Here is an extract of an 1880 translation by Rasmus Björn Anderson, provided by WikiSource:

He went into the hall, called his cup-bearer, and requested him to take the sconce-horn that his thanes were wont to drink from. The cup-bearer immediately brought forward the horn and handed it to Thor. Said Utgard-Loke: From this horn it is thought to be well drunk if it is emptied in one draught, some men empty it in two draughts, but there is no drinker so wretched that he cannot exhaust it in three.

For comparison, here is the 1916 translation of Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, provided by sacred-texts.com:

He went into the hall and called his serving-boy, and bade him bring the sconce-horn which the henchmen were wont to drink off. Straightway the serving-lad came forward with the horn and put it into Thor's hand. Then said Útgarda-Loki: 'It is held that this horn is well drained if it is drunk off in one drink, but some drink it off in two; but no one is so poor a man at drinking that it fails to drain off in three.'

In both cases the following text details Thor's unsuccessful attempts to drain the horn, and Utgard-Loki's patronizing mockery of him after. But neither one mentions at any point what was in the horn.

I thought it would be fun to take a look at the original Old Norse to see if the translators had elided this detail, and if it would look interesting. It was fun and it did look interesting. Here it is, courtesy of Heimskringla.NO:

Útgarða-Loki segir, at þat má vel vera, ok gengr inn í höllina ok kallar skutilsvein sinn, biðr, at hann taki vítishorn þat, er hirðmenn eru vanir at drekka af. Því næst kemr fram skutilsveinn með horninu ok fær Þór í hönd. Þá mælti Útgarða-Loki: "Af horni þessu þykkir þá vel drukkit, ef í einum drykk gengr af, en sumir menn drekka af í tveim drykkjum, en engi er svá lítill drykkjumaðr, at eigi gangi af í þrimr."

This was written in Old Norse around 1220, and I was astounded at how much of it is recognizable, at least when you already know what it is going to say. However, the following examples are all ill-informed speculation, and at least one of my confident claims is likely to be wrong. I hope that some of my Gentle Readers are Icelanders and can correct my more ridiculous errors.

“Höllina” is the hall. “Kallar” is to call in. The horn appears three times, as ‘horninu’, ‘horni’, and in ‘vítishorn’, which is a compound that specifies what kind of horn it is. “Þór í hönd” is “in Thor's hand”. (The ‘Þ’ is pronounced like the /th/ of “Thor”.) “Drekka”, “drukkit”, “drykk”, “drykkjum”, and “drykkjumaðr” are about drinking or draughts; “vel drukkit” is “well-drunk”. You can see the one-two-three in there as “einum-tveim-þrimr”. (Remember that the “þ” is a /th/.) One can almost see English in:

sumir menn drekka af í tveim drykkjum

which says “some men drink it in two drinks”. And “lítill drykkjumaðr” is a little-drinking-person, which I translated above as “wimp”.

It might be tempting to guess that “með horninu” is a mead-horn, but I'm pretty sure it is not; mead is “mjað” or “mjöð”. I'm not sure, but I think “með” here is just “with”, akin to modern German “mit”, so that:

næst kemr fram skutilsveinn með horninu

is something like “next, the skutilsveinn came with the horn”. (The skutilsveinn is something we don't have in English; compare trying to translate “designated hitter” into Old Norse.)

For a laugh, I tried putting this into Google Translate, and I was impressed with the results. It makes a heroic effort, and produces something that does capture some of the sense of the passage. It identifies the language as Icelandic, which while not correct, isn't entirely incorrect either. (The author, Snorri Sturluson, was in fact Icelandic.) Google somehow mistakes the horn for a corner, and it completely fails to get the obsolete term “hirðmenn” (roughly, “henchmen”), mistaking it for herdsmen. The skutilsveinn is one of the hirðmenn.

Anyway there is no mead here, and none in the rest of the story, which details Thor's unsuccessful attempts to drink the ocean. Nor is there any milk, which would be “mjólk”.

So where does that leave us? The jötunns challenge Thor to a drinking contest, and bring him a horn, and even though it was obviously mead, the story does not say what was in the horn.

Because why would they bother to say what was in the horn? It was obviously mead. When the boys crack open a cold one, you do not have to specify what it was that was cold, and nobody should suppose that it was a cold bottle of milk.

I imagine Marion N. French sitting by the fire, listening while Snorri tells the story of Thor and the enchanted drinking horn of Utgard:

“Utgarða-Loki called his skutilsveinn, and requested him to bring the penalty-horn that his hirðmen were wont to drink from…”

“Excuse me! Excuse me, Mr. Sturluson! Just what were they wont to drink from it?”

“Eh, what's that?”

”What beverage was in the horn?”

“Why, mead, of course. What did you think it was, milk?”

(Merriment ensues, liberally seasoned with patronizing mockery.)

(In preparing this article, I found it helpful to consult Zoëga's Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic of 1910.)

[ Addendum 2018-01-17: Holy cow, I was so wrong. It was so obviously not mead. I was so, so wrong. Amazingly, unbelievably wrong. ]

Fri, 05 Jan 2018

Last month I wrote about the Turkish analog of “Joe Blow”. I got email from Gaal Yahas, who said

I bet you'll get plenty of replies on your last post about translating "John Doe" to different languages.

Sadly no. But M. Yahas did tell me in detail about the Hebrew version, and I did a little additional research.

The Hebrew version of “Joe Blow” / “John Doe” is unequivocally “Ploni Almoni”. This usage goes back at least to the Book of Ruth, approximately 2500 years ago. Ruth's husband has died without leaving an heir, and custom demands that a close relative of her father-in-law should marry her, to keep the property in the family. Boaz takes on this duty, but first meets with another man, who is a closer relative than he:

Then went Boaz up to the gate, and sat him down there: and, behold, the kinsman of whom Boaz spake came by; unto whom he said, Ho, such a one! turn aside, sit down here. And he turned aside, and sat down.

(Ruth 4:1, KJV)

This other relative declines to marry Ruth. He is not named, and is referred to in the Hebrew version as Ploni Almoni, translated here as “such a one”. This article in The Jewish Chronicle discusses the possible etymology of these words, glossing “ploni” as akin to “covered” or “hidden” and “almoni” as akin to “silenced” or “muted”.

Ploni Almoni also appears in the book of Samuel, probably even older than Ruth:

David answered Ahimelek the priest, “The king sent me on a mission and said to me, 'No one is to know anything about the mission I am sending you on.' As for my men, I have told them to meet me at a certain place.”

(1 Samuel 21:2, NIV)

The mission is secret, so David does not reveal the meeting place to Ahimelek. Instead, he refers to it as Ploni Almoni. There is a similar usage at 2 Kings 6:8.

Apparently the use of “Ploni” in Hebrew to mean “some guy” continues through the Talmud and up to the present day. M. Yahas also alerted me to two small but storied streets in Tel Aviv. According to this article from Haaretz:

A wealthy American businessman was buying up chunks of real estate in Tel Aviv. He purchased the two alleyways with the intention of naming them after himself and his wife, even going so far as to put up temporary shingles with the streets’ new names. But he had christened the streets without official permission from the city council.

The mayor was so incensed by Shapira’s chutzpah that he decided to temporarily name the alleyways Simta Almonit and Simta Plonit.

And so they remain, 95 years later.

(M. Yahas explains that “Simta” means “alley” and is feminine, so that Ploni and Almoni take the feminine ‘-it’ ending to agree with it.)

Wikipedia has not one but many articles on this topic and related ones:

My own tiny contribution in this area: my in-laws live in a rather distant and undeveloped neighborhood on the periphery of Seoul, and I once referred to it as 아무데도동 (/amudedo-dong/), approximately “nowhereville”. This is not standard in Korean, but I believe the meaning is clear.

Tue, 02 Jan 2018

As I mentioned before, I have started another blog, called Content-type: text/shitpost.

The shitposts have been suffering quality creep and I am making an effort to lower my standards. I will keep you posted about how this develops. (I don't think the quality creep was the cause of lower volume this month; rather, I was on vacation for a week.)

Here is a list of last month's shitposts. I have added a short blurb to those that may be of more general interest.

I plan to continue to post monthly summaries here.

I was on vacation last week and I didn't bring my computer, which has been a good choice in the past. But I did bring my phone, and I spent some quiet time writing various parts of around 20 blog posts on the phone. I composed these in my phone's Google Docs app, which seemed at the time like a reasonable choice.

But when I got back I found that it wasn't as easy as I had expected to get the documents back out. What I really wanted was Markdown. HTML would have been acceptable, since Blosxom accepts that also. I could download a single document in one of several formats, including HTML and ODF, but I had twenty and didn't want to do them one at a time. Google has a bulk download feature, to download a zip file of an entire folder, but upon unzipping I found that all twenty documents had been converted to Microsoft's docx format and I didn't know a good way to handle these. I could not find an option for a bulk download in any other format.

Several tools will compose in Markdown and then export to Google docs, but the only option I found for translating from Google docs to Markdown was Renato Mangini's Google Apps script. I would have had to add the script to each of the 20 files, then run it, and the output appears in email, so for this task, it was even less like what I wanted.

The right answer turned out to be: Accept Google's bulk download of docx files and then use Pandoc to convert the docx to Markdown:

for i in *.docx; do
echo -n "$i ? "; read j; mv -i "$i" $j.docx; pandoc --extract-media . -t markdown -o "$(suf "$j" mkdn)" "$j.docx";
done


The read is because I had given the files Unix-unfriendly names like Polyominoes as orthogonal polygons.docx and I wanted to give them shorter names like orthogonal-polyominoes.docx.

The suf command is a little utility that performs the very common task of removing or changing the suffix of a filename. The suf "$j" mkdn command means that if $j is something like foo.docx it should turn into foo.mkdn. Here's the tiny source code:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Usage: suf FILENAME [suffix]
#
# If filename ends with a suffix, the suffix is replaced with the given suffix
# otheriswe, the given suffix is appended
#
# For example:
#   suf foo.bar baz    => foo.baz
#   suf foo     baz    => foo.baz
#   suf foo.bar        => foo
#   suf foo            => foo

@ARGV == 2 or @ARGV == 1 or usage();
my ($file,$suf) = @ARGV;
$file =~ s/\.[^.]*$//;
if (defined $suf) { print "$file.$suf\n"; } else { print "$file\n";
}

sub usage {
print STDERR "Usage: suf filename [newsuffix]\n";
exit 1;
}


Often, I feel that I have written too much code, but not this time. Some people might be tempted to add bells and whistles to this: what if the suffix is not delimited by a dot character? What if I only want to change certain suffixes? What if my foot swells up? What if the moon falls out of the sky? Blah blah blah. No, for that we can break out sed.

Next time I go on vacation I will know better and I will not use Google Docs. I don't know yet what instead. StackEdit maybe.

[ Addendum 20180108: Eric Roode pointed out that the program above has a genuine bug: if given a filename like a.b/c.d it truncates the entire b/c.d instead of just the d. The current version fixes this. ]

Fri, 22 Dec 2017

A couple of years ago I wrote here about some interesting projects I had not finished. One of these was to enumerate and draw orthogonal polygons.

An orthogonal polygon is simply one whose angles are all right angles. All rectangles are orthogonal polygons, but there are many other types. For example, here are examples of orthogonal decagons:

If you ignore the lengths of the edges, and pay attention only to the direction that the corners turn, the orthogonal polygons fall into types. The rectangle is the only type with four sides. There is also only one type with six sides; it is an L-shaped hexagon. There are four types with eight sides, as shown in the illustration.

Contributing to OEIS was a life goal of mine and I was thrilled when I was able to contribute the sequence of the number of types of orthogonal !!2n!!-gons.

Enumerating the types is not hard. For !!2n!!-gons, there is one type for each unordered sequence of !!n-2!! numbers whose sum is !!n+2!!. In the illustration above, !!n=5!! and each type is annotated with its !!5-2=3!! numbers whose sum is !!n+2=7!!. But the number of types increases rapidly with the number of sides, and it soons becomes infeasible to draw them by hand as I did above. I had wanted to write a computer program that would take a description of a type (the sequence) and render a drawing of one of the polygons of that type.

The tricky part is how to keep the edges from crossing, which is not allowed. I had ideas for how to do this, but it seemed troublesome, and also it seemed likely to produce ugly, lopsided examples, so I did not implement it. And eventually I forgot about the problem.

But Brent Yorgey did not forget, and he had a completely different idea. He wrote a program to convert a type description to a set of constraints on the !!x!! and !!y!! coordinates of the vertices, and fed the constraints to an SMT solver, which is a system for finding solutions to general sets of constraints. The outcome is as handsome as I could have hoped. Here is M. Yorgey's program's version of the hand-drawn diagram above:

M. Yorgey rendered beautiful pictures of all types of orthogonal polygons up to 12 sides. Check it out on his blog.

Thu, 21 Dec 2017

I have lived in Philadelphia almost 28 years, and I like it very much. I grew up in New York, and I have some of the typical New Yorker snobbery about the rest of the world, a sort of patronizing “oh, isn't that cute, at least you tried” attitude. This is not a good thing, and I have tried to get rid of it, with only partial success. Philadelphia is not New York and it is never going to be New York, and I am okay with that. When I first got here I was more doubtful, but I made an effort to find and appreciate things about Philadelphia that were better than in New York. There are many, but it took me a while to start noticing them.

In 1992 I wrote an article that began:

Someone asked me once what Philadelphia has that New York doesn't. I couldn't come up with anything good.

But the article explained explained that since then, I had found an excellent answer. I wrote about how I loved the Schuylkill river and how New York had nothing like the it. In Philadelphia you are always going back and forth across the Schuylkill river, sometimes in cars or buses or trains, sometimes on a bike, sometimes on foot. It is not a mighty river like the Hudson. (The Delaware fills that role for us.) The Schuylkill is smaller, but still important. The 1992 article said:

It makes what might otherwise be a static and monolithic entity into a dynamic and variable one. Manhattan is monolithic, like a giant baked potato. Philadelphia is complex inside, with structure and sub-organs, like your heart.

New York has rivers you can cross, but, like much of New York, they are not to human scale. Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge or the George Washington Bridge on foot are fun things to do, once in a while. But they are big productions, a thing you might want to plan ahead, as a special event. Crossing the Schuylkill on foot is something you do all the time. In 1993 I commuted across the Schuylkill on foot twice a day and it was lovely. I took a photograph of it each time, and enjoyed comparing the many looks of the Schuylkill.

Once I found that point of attachment, I started to find many more things about Philadelphia that are better than in New York. Just a few that come to mind:

• In New York, if you run into someone you know but had not planned to see, or meet a stranger with whom you have a common acquaintance, you are stunned. It is an epic coincidence, not quite a once-in-a-lifetime kind of thing, but maybe not a once-a-year thing either. In Philadelphia it is still unusual enough to be an interesting and happy surprise but not so rare as to make you wonder if you are being pranked.

• In Philadelphia, if you are walking down the street, and say hello to a stranger sitting on their stoop, they will say hello back to you. In New York they will stare at you as though you had just come from the moon, perhaps wondering what your angle is.

• If you live in New York, it is preferable to spend all of August in your vacation home, even if it is located on the shore of the lake of boiling pitch in the eighth circle of Hell. The weather is more pleasant in the eighth circle than it is in New York in August, and the air is cleaner. Never in 28 years in Philadelphia have I endured weather that is as bad as New York in August.

This is only a partial list. Philadelphia is superior to New York in many ways, and I left out the most important ones. I am very fond of Philadelphia, which is why I have lived here for 28 years. I can appreciate its good points, and when I encounter its bad points I no longer snarl and say “In New York we knew how to do this right.” Usually.

Usually.

One thing about Philadelphia is seriously broken. Philadelphians do not know how to get on a bus.

 Order NYC Basic Tips & Etiquette from Powell's

Every culture has its own customs. Growing up as a New Yorker, I learned early and deeply a cardinal part of New York's protocol: Get out of the way. Seriously, if you visit New York and you can't get anything else right, at least get out of the way. Here is advice from Nathan Pyle's etiquette guide for newcomers to New York:

Insofar as I still have any authority to speak for New Yorkers, I endorse the advice in this book on their behalf. Quite a lot of it consists of special cases of “get out of the way”. Tip #41 says so in so many words: “Basically anything goes as long as you stay out of the way.” Tip #31 says to take your luggage off the subway seat next to you, and put it on your lap. Tip #65 depicts the correct way of stopping on the sidewalk to enjoy a slice of pizza: immediately adjacent to a piece of street furniture that the foot traffic would have had to have gone around anyway.

Suppose you get on the bus in New York. You will find that the back of the bus is full, and the front is much less so. You are at the front. What do you do now? You move as far back as is reasonably possible — up to the beginning of the full section — so that the next person to get in can do the same. This is (obviously, if you are a New Yorker) the only way to make efficient use of the space and fill up the bus.

In Philadelphia, people do not do this. People get on the bus, move as far back as is easy and convenient, perhaps halfway, or perhaps only a few feet, and then stop, as the mood takes them. And so it often happens that when the bus arrives the new passengers will have to stand in the stepwell, or can't get on at all — even though the bus is only half full. Not only is there standing room in the back, but there are usually seats in the back. The bus abandons people at the stop, because there is no room for them to get on, because there is someone standing halfway down blocking the aisle, and the person just in front of them doesn't want to push past them, and those two people block everyone else.

In New York, the passengers in front would brusquely push their way past these people and perhaps rebuke them. New Yorkers are great snarlers, but Philadelphians seem to be too polite to snarl at strangers. Nobody in Philadelphia says anything, and the space is wasted. People with kids and packages are standing up because people behind them can't be bothered to sit down.

I don't know what the problem is with these people. Wouldn't it easier to move to the back of the bus and to sit down in the empty seats than it is to stand up and block the aisle? I have tried for a quarter of a century to let go of the idea that people in New York are smarter and better and people elsewhere are slow-witted rubes, and I have mostly succeeded. But where Philadelphians are concerned, this bus behavior is a major sticking point.

In New York we knew how to do this right.

Mon, 18 Dec 2017

A few weeks ago I was writing something about Turkey, and I needed a generic Turkish name, analogous to “John Doe”. I was going to use “Osman Yılmaz”, which I think would have been a decent choice, but I decided it would be more fun to ask a Turkish co-worker what the correct choice would be. I asked Kıvanç Yazan, who kindly allowed himself to be nerdsniped and gave me a great deal of information. In the rest of this article, anything about Turkish that is correct should be credited to him, while any mistakes are surely my own.

M. Yazan informs me that one common choice is “Ali Veli”. Here's a link he gave me to Ekşisözlük, which is the Turkish analog of Urban Dictionary, explaining (in Turkish) the connotations of “John Doe”. The page also mentions “John Smith”, which in turn links to a page about a footballer named Ali Öztürk—in fact two footballers. ([1] [2]) which is along the same lines as my “Osman Yılmaz” suggestion.

But M. Yazan told me about a much closer match for “John Doe”. It is:

sarı çizmeli Mehmet Ağa

which translates as “Mehmet Agha with yellow boots”. (‘Sarı’ = ‘yellow’; ‘çizmeli’ = ‘booted’.)

This oddly specific phrase really seems to be what I was looking for. M. Yazan provided several links:

• Ekşisözlük again
• The official dictionary of the Turkish government

Unfortunately I can't find any way to link to the specific entry, but the definition it provides is “kim olduğu, nerede oturduğu bilinmeyen kimse” which means approximately “someone whose identity/place is unknown”.

• A paper on “Personal Names in Sayings and Idioms”.

This is in Turkish, but M. Yazan has translated the relevant part as follows:

At the time when yellow boots were in fashion, a guy from İzmir put "Mehmet Aga" in his account book. When time came to pay the debt , he sent his servant and asked him to find "Mehmet Aga with yellow boots". The helper did find a Mehmet Aga, but it was not the one they were looking for. Then guy gets angry at his servant, to which his helper responded, “Sir, this is a big city, there are lots of people with yellow boots, and lots of people named Mehmet! You should write it in your book one more time!”

Another source I found was this online Turkish-English dictionary which glosses it as “Joe Schmoe”.

Finding online mentions of sarı çizmeli Mehmet Ağa is a little bit tricky, because he is also the title of a song by the very famous Turkish musician Barış Manço, and the references to this song swamp all the other results. This video features Manço's boots and although we cannot see for sure (the recording is in grayscale) I presume that the boots are yellow.

Thanks again, Kıvanç!

[ Addendum: The Turkish word for “in style” is “moda”. I guessed it was a French loanword. Kıvanç tells me I was close: it is from Italian. ]

[ Addendum 20171219: Wikipedia has an impressive list of placeholder names by language that includes Mehmet Ağa. ]

[ Addendum 20180105: The Hebrew version of Mehmet Ağa is at least 2600 years old! ]

Fri, 15 Dec 2017

This math.se question asks how to show that, among any 11 integers, one can find a subset of exactly six that add up to a multiple of 6. Let's call this “Ebrahimi’s theorem”.

This was the last thing I read before I put away my phone and closed my eyes for the night, and it was a race to see if I would find an answer before I fell asleep. Sleep won the race this time. But the answer is not too hard.

1. First, observe that among any five numbers there are three that sum to a multiple of 3: Consider the remainders of the five numbers upon division by 3. There are three possible remainders. If all three remainders are represented, then the remainders are !!\{0,1,2\}!! and the sum of their representatives is a multiple of 3. Otherwise there is some remainder with three representatives, and the sum of these three is a multiple of 3.

2. Now take the 11 given numbers. Find a group of three whose sum is a multiple of 3 and set them aside. From the remaining 8 numbers, do this a second time. From the remaining 5 numbers, do it a third time.

3. We now have three groups of three numbers that each sum to a multiple of 3. Two of these sums must have the same parity. The six numbers in those two groups have an even sum that is a multiple of 3, and we win.

Here is a randomly-generated example:

$$3\quad 17\quad 35\quad 42\quad 44\quad 58\quad 60\quad 69\quad 92\quad 97\quad 97$$

Looking at the first 5 numbers !!3\ 17\ 35\ 42\ 44!! we see that on division by 3 these have remainders !!0\ 2\ 2\ 0\ 2!!. The remainder !!2!! is there three times, so we choose those three numbers !!\langle17\ 35\ 44\rangle!!, whose sum is a multiple of 3, and set them aside.

Now we take the leftover !!3!! and !!42!! and supplement them with three more unused numbers !!58\ 60\ 69!!. The remainders are !!0\ 0\ 1\ 0\ 0!! so we take !!\langle3\ 42\ 60\rangle!! and set them aside as a second group.

Then we take the five remaining unused numbers !!58\ 69\ 92\ 97\ 97!!. The remainders are !!1\ 0\ 2\ 1\ 1!!. The first three !!\langle 58\ 69\ 92\rangle!!have all different remainders, so let's use those as our third group.

The three groups are now !! \langle17\ 35\ 44\rangle, \langle3\ 42\ 60\rangle, \langle58\ 69\ 92\rangle!!. The first one has an even sum and the second has an odd sum. The third group has an odd sum, which matches the second group, so we choose the second and third groups, and that is our answer:

$$3\qquad 42\qquad 60\qquad 58 \qquad 69 \qquad 92$$

The sum of these is !!324 = 6\cdot 54!!.

This proves that 11 input numbers are sufficient to produce one output set of 6 whose sum is a multiple of 6. Let's write !!E(n, k)!! to mean that !!n!! inputs are enough to produce !!k!! outputs. That is, !!E(n, k)!! means “any set of !!n!! numbers contains !!k!! distinct 6-element subsets whose sum is a multiple of 6.” Ebrahimi’s theorem, which we have just proved, states that !!E(11, 1)!! is true, and obviously it also proves !!E(n, 1)!! for all larger !!n!!.

I would like to consider the following questions:

1. Does this proof suffice to show that !!E(10, 1)!! is false?
2. Does this proof suffice to show that !!E(11, 2)!! is false?

I am specifically not asking whether !!E(10, 1)!! or !!E(11, 2)!! are actually false. There are easy counterexamples that can be found without reference to the proof above. What I want to know is if the proof, as given, contains nontrivial information about these questions.

The reason I think this is interesting is that I think, upon more careful examination, that I will find that the proof above does prove at least one of these, perhaps with a very small bit of additional reasoning. But there are many similar proofs that do not work this way. Here is a famous example. Let !!W(n, k)!! be shorthand for the following claim:

Let the integers from 1 to !!n!! be partitioned into two sets. Then one of the two sets contains !!k!! distinct subsets of three elements of the form !!\{a, a+d, a+2d\}!! for integers !!a, d!!.

Then:

Van der Waerden's theorem: !!W(325, 1)!! is true.

!!W()!!, like !!E()!!, is monotonic: van der Waerden's theorem trivially implies !!W(n, 1)!! for all !!n!! larger than 325. Does it also imply that !!W(n, 1)!! is false for smaller !!n!!? No, not at all; this is actually untrue. Does it also imply that !!W(325, k)!! is false for !!k>1!!? No, this is false also.

Van der Waerden's theorem takes 325 inputs (the integers) and among them finds one output (the desired set of three). But this is extravagantly wasteful. A better argument shows that only 9 inputs were required for the same output, and once we know this it is trivial that 325 inputs will always produce at least 36 outputs, and probably a great many more.

Proofs of theorems in Ramsey theory are noted for being extravagant in exactly this way. But the proof of Ebrahimi's theorem is different. It is not only frugal, it is optimally so. It uses no more inputs than are absolutely necessary.

What is different about these cases? What is the source the frugality of the proof of Ebrahimi’s theorem? Is there a way that we can see from examination of the proof that it will be optimally frugal?

Ebrahimi’s theorem shows !!E(11, 1)!!. Suppose instead we want to show !!E(n, 2)!! for some !!n!!. From Ebrahimi’s theorem itself we immediately get !!E(22, 2)!! and indeed !!E(17, 2)!!. Is this the best we can do? (That is, is !!E(16, 2)!! false?) I bet it isn't. If it isn't, what went wrong? Or rather, what went right in the !!k=1!! case that stopped working when !!k>1!!?

I don't know.

Sat, 09 Dec 2017

The Volokh Conspiracy is a frequently-updated blog about legal issues. It reports on interesting upcoming court cases and recent court decisions and sometimes carries thoughtful and complex essays on legal theory. It is hosted by, but not otherwise affiliated with, the Washington Post.

Volokh periodically carries a “roundup of recent federal court decisions”, each with an intriguing one-paragraph summary and a link to the relevant documents, usually to the opinion itself. I love reading federal circuit court opinions. They are almost always carefully thought out and clearly-written. Even when I disagree with the decision, I almost always concede that the judges have a point. It often happens that I read the decision and say “of course that is how it must be decided, nobody could disagree with that”, and then I read the dissenting opinion and I say exactly the same thing. Then I rub my forehead and feel relieved that I'm not a federal circuit court judge.

This is true of U.S. Supreme Court decisions also. Back when I had more free time I would sometimes visit the listing of all recent decisions and pick out some at random to read. They were almost always really interesting. When you read the newspaper about these decisions, the newspaper always wants to make the issue simple and usually tribal. (“Our readers are on the (Red / Blue) Team, and the (Red / Blue) Team loves mangel-wurzels. Justice Furter voted against mangel-wurzels, that is because he is a very bad man who hates liberty! Rah rah team!”) The actual Supreme Court is almost always better than this.

For example we have Clarence Thomas's wonderful dissent in the case of Gonzales v. Raich. Raich was using marijuana for his personal medical use in California, where medical marijuana had been legal for years. The DEA confiscated and destroyed his supplier's plants. But the Constitution only gives Congress the right to regulate interstate commerce. This marijuana had been grown in California by a Californian, for use in California by a Californian, in accordance with California law, and had never crossed any state line. In a 6–3 decision, the court found that the relevant laws were nevertheless a permitted exercise of Congress's power to regulate commerce. You might have expected Justice Thomas to vote against marijuana. But he did not:

If the majority is to be taken seriously, the Federal Government may now regulate quilting bees, clothes drives, and potluck suppers throughout the 50 States. This makes a mockery of Madison’s assurance to the people of New York that the “powers delegated” to the Federal Government are “few and defined,” while those of the States are “numerous and indefinite.”

Thomas may not be a fan of marijuana, but he is even less a fan of federal overreach and abuse of the Commerce Clause. These nine people are much more complex than the newspapers would have you believe.

But I am digressing. Back to Volokh's federal court roundups. I have to be careful not to look at these roundups when I have anything else that must be done, because I inevitably get nerdsniped and read several of them. If you enjoy this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you will enjoy.

I want to give some examples, but can't decide which sound most interesting, so here are three chosen at random from the most recent issue:

• Warden at Brooklyn, N.Y., prison declines prisoner’s request to keep stuffed animals. A substantial burden on the prisoner’s sincere religious beliefs?

• Online reviewer pillories Newport Beach accountant. Must Yelp reveal the reviewer’s identity?

• With no crosswalks nearby, man jaywalks across five-lane avenue, is struck by vehicle. Is the church he was trying to reach negligent for putting its auxiliary parking lot there?

[ Addendum 20171213: Volokh has just left the Washington Post, and moved to Reason, citing changes in the Post's paywall policies. ]