A few years later I revisited Milo, who by daylie lifting a Calfe,
attained an ability to carry it being a Bull.
[ Addendum 20200501: Uquhart was a very peculiar man. ]
[Other articles in category /book]
permanent link
Jools Holland
I ran into
this album
by Jools Holland:

What do you see when you look at this? If you're me, you spend a few
minutes wondering why there is a map of Delaware.

(Previously)
[Other articles in category /misc]
permanent link
Tiers of answers to half-baked questions
[ This article is itself somewhat half-baked. ]
There's this thing that happens on Stack Exchange sometimes. A
somewhat-clueless person will show up and ask a half-baked question
about something they are thinking about. Their question is groping
toward something sensible but won't be all the way there, and then
several people will reply saying no, that is not sensible, your idea
is silly, without ever admitting that there is anything to the idea at
all.
I have three examples of this handy, and I'm sure I could find many
more.
One recent one concerns chirality (handedness) in topology.
OP showed up to ask why a donut seems to be achiral while a coffee cup
is chiral (because the handle is on one side and not the other). Some
people told them that the coffee cup is actually achiral and some
others people told them that topology doesn't distinguish between
left- and right-handed objects, because reflection is a continuous
transformation.
(“From a topological point of view, no object is distinguishable from its mirror image”.)
I've seen many similar discussions play out the same way in the past.
But nobody (other than me) told them that there is a whole branch of
topology, knot theory, where the difference between left- and
right-handed objects is a major concern. Everyone else was just acting
like this was a nonissue.
This category theory example
is somewhat more obscure.
In category theory one can always turn any construction backward to
make a “dual” construction, and the “dual” construction is different
but usually no less interesting than the original. For example, there
is a category-theoretic construction of “product objects”, which
generalizes cartesian products of sets, topological product
spaces, the direct product of groups, and so on. The dual
construction is “coproduct objects” which corresponds to the disjoint
union of sets and topological spaces, and to the free product of groups.
There is a standard notion of an “exponential object” and OP wanted to
know about the dual notion of a “co-exponential object”. They gave a
proposed definition of such an object, but got their proposal a little
bit wrong, so that what they had defined was not the actual
co-exponential object but instead was trivial. Two other users pointed
out in detail why their proposed construction was uninteresting.
Neither one pointed out that there is a co-exponential object, and
that it is interesting, if you perform the dualization correctly.
(The exponential object concerns a certain property of a mapping !!f
:A×B\to C!!. OP asked insead about !!f : C\to A× B!!. Such a
mapping can always be factored into a product !!(f_1: C\to A)×(f_2:
C\to B)!! and then the two factors can be treated independently. The
correct dual construction concerns a property of a mapping !!f :
C\to A\sqcup B!!, where !!\sqcup!! is the coproduct. This admits no
corresponding simplification.)
A frequently-asked question is (some half-baked variation on)
whether there is a smallest positive real number. Often this is
motivated by the surprising fact that !!0.9999\ldots = 1!!, and in
an effort to capture their intuitive notion of the difference,
sometimes OP will suggest that there should be a number
!!0.000\ldots 1!!, with “an infinite number of zeroes before the
1”.
There is no such real number, but the question is a reasonable one
to ask and to investigate. Often people will dismiss the question
claiming that it does not make any sense at all, using some formula
like “you can't have a 1 after an infinite sequence of zeroes,
because an infinite sequence of zeroes goes on forever.”.
Mathematically, this response is complete bullshit because
mathematicians are perfectly comfortable with the idea of an
infinite sequence that has one item (or more) appended after the others.
(Such an object is said to “have order type !!\omega + 1!!”, and is
completely legitimate.) The problem isn't with the proposed object
itself, but with the results of the attempt to incorporate it into
the arithmetic of real numbers: what would you get, for example, if
you tried to multiply it by !!10!!?
Or sometimes one sees answers that go no further than “no, because
the definition of a real number is…”. But a better engagement with
the question would recognize that OP is probably interested in
alternative definitions of real numbers.
In a recent blog article I proposed
a classification of answers to certain half-baked software questions
(“Is it possible to do X?”):
- It surely could, but nobody has done it yet
- It perhaps could, but nobody is quite sure how
- It maybe could, but what you want is not as clear as you think
- It can't, because that is impossible
- I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas
that could provoke such a question
and I said:
Often, engineers will go straight to #5, when actually the answer is
in a higher tier. Or they go to #4 without asking if maybe, once the
desiderata are clarified a bit, it will move from “impossible” to
merely “difficult”. These are bad habits.
These mathematically half-baked questions also deserve better answers.
A similar classification of answers to “can we do this” might look like this:
- Yes, that is exactly what we do, only more formally. You can
find out more about the details in this source…
- Yes, we do something very much like that, but there are some
significant differences to address points you have not considered…
- Yes, we might like to do something along those lines, but to make
it work we need to make some major changes…
- That seems at first like a reasonable thing to try, but if you
look more deeply you find that it can't be made to work, because…
- I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas
that could provoke such a question
The category theory answer was from tier 4, but should have been from
tier 2. People asking about !!0.0000…1!! often receive answers from
tier 5, but ought to get answers from tier 4, or even tier 3, if you
wanted to get into nonstandard analysis à la Robinson.
There is a similar hierarchy for questions of the type “can we model
this concept mathematically”, ranging from “yes, all the time” through
“nobody has figured that out yet” and “it seems unlikely, because”, to
“what would that even mean?”. The topological chirality question was
of this type and the answers given were from the “no we can't and
we don't” tiers, when they could have been from a much higher tier:
“yes, it's more complicated than that but there is an entire subfield
devoted to dealing with it.”
This is a sort of refinement of
the opposition of “yes, and…” versus “no, but…”,
with the tiers something like:
- Yes, and…
- Yes, but…
- Perhaps, if…
- No, but…
- No, because…
- I am embarrassed for you
When formulating the answer to a question, aiming for the upper tiers
usually produces more helpful, more useful, and more interesting
results.
[ Addendum 20200525: Here's a typical dismissal of the !!0.\bar01!! suggestion: “This is confusing because !!0.\bar01!! seems to indicate a decimal with ‘infinite zeros and then a one at the end.’ Which, of course, is absurd.” ]
[ Addendum 20230421: Another example, concerning “almost orthogonal” unit vectors ]
[Other articles in category /misc]
permanent link
Mystery spam language
This morning I got spam with this subject:
Subject: yaxşı xəbər
Now what language is that? The ‘şı’ looks Turkish, but I don't think
Turkish has a letter ‘ə’. It took me a little while to find out the answer.
It's Azerbaijani. Azerbaijani has an Arabic script and a Latin script;
this is the Latin script.
Azerbaijani is very similar to Turkish and I suppose they use the ‘ş’
and ‘ı’ for the same things. I speculated that the ‘x’ was analogous to
Turkish ‘ğ’, but it appears not; Azerbaijani also has
‘ğ’ and in former times they used ‘
ƣ’ for this.
Bonus trivia: The official Unicode name of ‘ƣ’ is
LATIN SMALL LETTER OI
.
Unicode Technical Note #27 says:
These should have been called letter GHA. They are neither pronounced
'oi' nor based on the letters 'o' and 'i'.
[ Addendum 20210215: I was please to discover today that I have not yet forgotten
what Azeri looks like. ]
[Other articles in category /lang]
permanent link
Hidden emeralds
Dave Turner pointed me to the 1939 Russian-language retelling of The
Wizard of Oz, titled
The Wizard of the Emerald City.
In Russian the original title was Волшебник Изумрудного Города. It's
fun to try to figure these things out. Often Russian words are
borrowed from English or are at least related to things I know but this
one was tricky. I didn't recognize any of the words. But from the
word order I'd expect that Волшебник was the wizard. -ого is a
possessive ending so maybe Изумрудного is “of emeralds”? But
Изумрудного didn't look anything like emeralds… until it did.
Изумрудного is pronounced (approximately) “izumrudnogo”. But
“emerald” used to have an ‘s’ in it, “esmerald”. (That's where we get
the name “Esmeralda”.) So the “izumrud” is not that far off from
“esmerad” and there they are!
[Other articles in category /lang]
permanent link
Earlier dumpster fires
In my previous article I claimed
the oldest known metaphorical use of “dumpster
fire” is in reference to the movie
Shrek the Third.
However, this is mistaken. Eric Harley has brought to my attention
that the phrase was used as early as 2003 to describe The Texas
Chainsaw Massacre. According to
this Salt Lake Tribune article:
One early use found by Oxford Dictionaries' Jeff Sherwood was a 2003
movie review by the Arizona Republic's Bill Muller that referred to
that year's remake of "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" as "the cinematic
equivalent of a dumpster fire — stinky but insignificant."
If Sherwood is affiliated with Oxford Dictionaries, I wonder why this
citation hasn't gotten into the Big Dictionary. The Tribune also
pointed me to
Claire Fallon's 2016 discussion of the phrase.
Thank you, M. Harley.
[Other articles in category /lang]
permanent link
Dumpster fires
Today I learned that the oldest known metaphorical use of “dumpster
fire” (to mean “a chaotic or disastrously mishandled situation”) is
in reference to the movie
Shrek the Third.
The OED's earliest citation is from
a 2008 Usenet post,
oddly in rec.sport.pro-wrestling
. I looked in Google Book search
for an earlier one, but everything I found was about literal
dumpster fires.
I missed the movie, and now that I know it was the original Dumpster
Fire, I feel lucky.
[ Addendum 20200417: More about this. ]
[Other articles in category /lang]
permanent link
Fern motif experts on the Internet
I live near Woodlands Cemetery
and by far the largest monument there, a thirty-foot obelisk, belongs
to Thomas W. Evans, who is an interesting
person. In his life he was a world-famous dentist, whose clients
included many crowned heads of Europe. He was born in Philadelphia,
and land to the University of Pennsylvania to found a dental school,
which to this day is located at the site of Evans’ former family home
at 40th and Spruce Street.
A few days ago my family went to visit the cemetery and I insisted on
visting the Evans memorial.

The obelisk has this interesting ornament:

The thing around the middle is evidently a wreath of pine branches,
but what is the thing in the middle? Some sort of leaf, or frond
perhaps? Or is it a feather? If Evans had been a writer I would have
assumed it was a quill pen, but he was a dentist. Thanks to the
Wonders of the Internet, I was able to find out.
First I
took the question to
Reddit's /r/whatisthisthing forum. Reddit
didn't have the answer, but
Reddit user @hangeryyy had
something better: they observed that there was
a fad for fern decorations, called
pteridomania, in the second half of the 19th century. Maybe the
thing was a fern.
I was nerdsniped by pteridomania and found out that a book on pteridomania
had been written by Dr. Sarah Whittingham, who goes by the
encouraging
Twitter name of @DrFrond.
Dr. Whittingham's opinion
is that this is not a fern frond, but a palm frond. The question
has been answered to my full and complete satisfaction.
My thanks to Dr. Whittingham, @hangeryyy, and the /r/whatisthisthing
community.
[Other articles in category /art]
permanent link
Anglo-Saxon and Hawai‘ian Wikipedias
Yesterday browsing the
list of Wikipedias
I learned there is an
Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia. This
seems really strange to me for several reasons: Who is writing it?
And why?
And there is a vocabulary problem. Not just because
Anglo-Saxon is dead, and one wouldn't expect it to have any
words for anything not invented in the last 900 years or so. But also,
there are very few extant Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, so we don't have a
lot of vocabulary, even for things that had been invented beore the
language died.
Helene Hanff said:
I have these guilts about never having read Chaucer but I was talked
out of learning Early Anglo-Saxon / Middle English by a friend who
had to take it for her Ph.D. They told her to write an essay in
Early Anglo-Saxon on any-subject-of-her-own-choosing. “Which is all
very well,” she said bitterly, “but the only essay subject you can
find enough Early Anglo-Saxon words for is ‘How to Slaughter a
Thousand Men in a Mead Hall’.”
I don't read Anglo-Saxon but if you want to investigate, you might
look at the Anglo-Saxon article about the
Maybach Exelero
(a hēahfremmende sportƿægn),
Barack Obama,
or
taekwondo. I am
pre-committing to not getting sucked into this, but sportƿægn is
evidently intended to mean “sportscar” (the ƿ is an obsolete letter
called wynn and is approximately a W, so that ƿægn
is “wagon”) and I think that fremmende is “foreign” and hēah is
something like "high" or "very". But I'm really not sure.
Anyway Wikipedia reports that the Anglo-Saxon Wikipedia has 3,197
articles (although most are very short) and around 30 active users.
In contrast, the
Hawai‘ian Wikipedia has 3,919
articles and only around 14 active users, and that is a language that
people actually speak.
[Other articles in category /lang]
permanent link
Caricatures of Nazis and the number four in Russian
[ Warning: this article is kinda all over the place. ]
I was looking at this awesome poster of
D. Moor (Д. Моор), one of Russia's most famous
political poster artists:

(original source at Artchive.RU)
This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, in Russian,
“Himmler”, “Göring”, “Hitler”, and “Goebbels” all begin with the same
letter, ‘Г’, which is homologous to ‘G’. (Similarly, Harry Potter in
Russian is Га́рри, ‘Garri’.)
I also love the pictures, and especially Goebbels. These four men
were so ugly, each in his own distinctively loathsome way. The artist
has done such a marvelous job of depicting them, highlighting their
various hideousness. It's exaggerated, and yet not unfair, these are
really good likenesses! It's as if D. Moor had drawn a map of all the
ways in which these men were ugly.
My all-time favorite depiction
of Goebbels is this one, by Boris Yefimov (Бори́с Ефи́мов):

For comparison, here's the actual Goebbels:

Looking at pictures of Goebbels, I had often thought “That is one ugly
guy,” but never been able to put my finger on what specifically was
wrong with his face. But since seeing the Yefimov picture, I have
never been able to look at a picture of Goebbels without thinking of a
rat. D. Moor has also drawn Goebbels as a tiny rat, scurrying around
the baseboards of his poster.
Anyway, that was not what I had planned to write about. The
right-hand side of D. Moor's poster imagines the initial ‘Г’ of the
four Nazis’ names as the four bent arms of the swastika. The captions
underneath mean “first Г”, “second Г” and so on.
[ Addendum: Darrin Edwards explains the meaning here that had escaped me:
One of the Russian words for shit is "govno" (говно). A euphemism for this is to just use the initial g; so "something na g" is roughly equivalent to saying "a crappy something". So the title "vse na g" (all on g) is literally "they all start with g" but pretty blatantly means "they're all crap" or "what a bunch of crap". I believe the trick of constructing the swastika out of four g's is meant to extend this association from the four men to the entire movement…
Thank you, M. Edwards! ]
Looking at the
fourth one, четвертое /chetvyertoye/, I had a sudden brainwave.
“Aha,” I thought, “I bet this is akin to Greek “tetra”, and the /t/
turned into /ch/ in Russian.”
Well, now that I'm writing it down it doesn't seem that exciting. I
now remember that all the other Russian number words are clearly
derived from PIE just as
Greek, Latin, and German are:
English
| German
| Latin
| Greek
| Russian
|
---|
one
| ein
| unum
| εἷς (eis)
| оди́н (odeen)
|
two
| zwei
| duo
| δύο (dyo)
| два (dva)
|
three
| drei
| trēs
| τρεῖς (treis)
| три (tri)
|
four
| vier
| quattuor
| τέτταρες (tettares)
| четы́ре (chyetirye)
|
five
| fünf
| quinque
| πέντε (pente)
| пять (pyat’)
|
In Latin that /t/ turned into a /k/ and we get /quadra/ instead of
/tetra/. The Russian Ч /ch/ is more like a /t/ than it is like a /k/.
The change from /t/ to /f/ in English and /v/ in German is a bit
weird. (The Big Dictionary says it “presents anomalies of which the
explanation is still disputed”.) The change from the /p/ of ‘pente’
to the /f/ of ‘five’ is much more typical. (Consider Latin ‘pater’,
‘piscum’, ‘ped’ and the corresponding English ‘father’, ‘fish’,
‘foot’.) This is called Grimm's Law, yeah, after
that Grimm.
The change from /q/ in quinque to /p/ in pente is also not
unusual. (The ancestral form in PIE is believed to have been more
like the /q/.) There's a classification of Celtic lanugages into
P-Celtic and Q-Celtic that's
similar, exemplified by the change from the Irish patronymic prefix
Mac- into the Welsh patronymic map or ap.
I could probably write a whole article comparing the numbers from one
to ten in these languages. (And Sanskrit. Wouldn't want to leave out
Sanskrit.) The line for ‘two’ would be a great place to begin because
all those words are basically the same, with only minor and typical
variations in the spelling and pronunciation. Maybe someday.
[Other articles in category /lang/etym]
permanent link
Screensharing your talk slides is skeuomorphic
Back when the Web was much newer, and people hadn't really figured it
out yet, there was an attempt to bring a dictionary to the web. Like
a paper dictionary, its text was set in a barely-readable tiny font,
and there were page breaks in arbitrary places. That is a
skeuomorph: it's an incidental feature of an object that persists even
in a new medium where the incidental feature no longer makes sense.
Anyway, I was scheduled to give a talk to
the local Linux user group last week,
and because of current conditions we tried doing it as a
videoconference. I thought this went well!
We used Jitsi Meet, which I thought worked
quite well, and which I recommend.
The usual procedure is for the speaker to have some sort of
presentation materials, anachronistically called “slides”, which they
display one at a time to the audience. In the Victorian age these
were glass plates, and the image was projected on a screen with a
slide projector. Later developments replaced the glass with celluloid
or other transparent plastic, and then with digital projectors. In
videoconferences, the slides are presented by displaying them on the
speaker's screen, and then sharing the screen image to the audience.
This last development is skeuomorphic. When the audience is together
in a big room, it might make sense to project the slide images on a
shared screen. But when everyone is looking at the talk on their own
separate screen anyway, why make them all use the exact same copy?
Instead, I published the slides on my website ahead of time,
and sent the link to the attendees. They had the option to follow
along on the web site, or to download a copy and follow along in their
own local copy.
This has several advantages:
Each audience person can adjust the monitor size, font size, colors
to suit their own viewing preferences.
With the screenshare, everyone is stuck with whatever I have
chosen. If my font is too small for one person to read, they are
out of luck.
The audience can see the speaker. Instead of using my outgoing
video feed to share the slides, I could share my face as I spoke.
I'm not sure how common this is, but I hate attending lectures
given by disembodied voices. And I hate even more being the
disembodied voice. Giving a talk to people I can't see is creepy.
My one condition to the Linux people was that I had to be able to
see at least part of the audience.
With the slides under their control, audience members can go back
to refer to earlier material, or skip ahead if they want. Haven't
you had the experience of having the presenter skip ahead to the
next slide before you had finished reading the one you were looking
at? With this technique, that can't happen.
Some co-workers suggested the drawback that it might be annoying to
try to stay synchronized with the speaker. It didn't take me long to
get in the habit of saying “Next slide, #18” or whatever as I moved
through the talk. If you try this, be sure to put numbers on the
slides! (This is a good practice anyway, I have found.) I don't know
if my audience found it annoying.
The whole idea only works if you can be sure that everyone will have
suitable display software for your presentation materials. If you
require WalSoft AwesomePresent version 18.3, it will be a problem.
But for the past 25 years I have made my presentation materials in
HTML, so this wasn't an issue.
If you're giving a talk over videoconference, consider trying this
technique.
[ Addendum: I should write an article about all the many ways in which the HTML has been a good choice. ]
[ Addendum 20201102: I implemented a little software system,
page-turner
, that
addresses my co-workers’ objections that it might be annoying to try
to stay synchronized with the speaker. The little system
automatically keeps the pages synchronized with the presenter, except
when attendee doesn't want that. I wrote a followup blog post about
page-turner
. ]
[Other articles in category /talk]
permanent link