The Universe of Disco

Help wanted: blog redesign

When I first set up this blog I didn't know how long I would do it, so instead of thinking about how I wanted it to look, I just took the default layout that came with Blosxom, and figured that I would change it when I got around to it. Now I am getting around to it.

The primary problem is that the current implementation (with nested tables!) performs badly, especially on mobile devices and especially on pages with a lot of MathJax. A secondary issue is that it's troublesome to edit. People sometimes laugh at how it looks like a 2006 design (which it is). I don't much care about this. I like the information-dense layout, which I think is distinctive and on-brand.

I would like a redesign that fixes these two problems. The primary goal is to get rid of the nested tables and replace the implementation with something that browsers can handle better, probably something based on CSS Flexbox. It doesn't have to look very different, but it does need to be straightforward enough that I can make the next ten years of changes without a lot of research and experimentation.

If you know someone interested in doing this, please email me a referral or have them get in touch with me. If you are interested in doing it yourself, please send me a proposal. Include a cost estimate, as this would be paid work.

Please do not advertise this on Hacker News, as that would run the risk of my getting 100 proposals, and that would be 50 times as many as I need.

Thanks.

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If I haven't replied to your email about Haskell…

Yesterday I posted:

Perhaps someone out there wants to take a chance on a senior programmer with thirty years of experience who wants to make a move into Haskell.

This worked better than I expected. Someone posted it to Hacker News, and it reached #1. I got 45 emails with suggestions about where to apply, and some suggestions through other channels also. Many thanks to everyone who contributed.

I'm answering the messages in the order I received them. Thoughtful replies take time. If I haven't answered yours yet, it's not that I am uninterested, or I am blowing you off. It's because I got 45 emails.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

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I would like a job writing Haskell

Perhaps someone out there wants to take a chance on a senior programmer with thirty years of experience who wants to make a move into Haskell.

I'm between jobs right now, having resigned my old one without having a new one lined up. It's been a pleasant vacation but it can't go on forever. At some point I'll need another job.

I would really like it to be Haskell programming but I don't know where to look. I hope maybe one of my Gentle Readers does.

I don't have any professional or substantial Haskell experience, but a Haskell shop might be happy to get me anyway. I think I'm well-prepared to rapidly get up to speed writing production Haskell programs:

• Although I have never been paid to write Haskell, I'm not a newbie. I have been using Haskell on and off for twenty years. I have been immersed in the Haskell ecosystem since the 1998 language standard was fresh. I've read the important papers. I know how the language has evolved. I know how to read the error messages. Haskell has featured regularly on my blog since I started it.

• I solidly understand the Hindley-Milner type elaboration algorithm and the typeclass stuff that Haskell puts on top of that. I have successfully written many thousands of lines of SML, which uses an earlier version of the same system. I'm 100% behind the strong-typing philosophy.

• I have a mathematics background. I know the applicable category theory. I understand what it means when someone says that a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors. I won't be scared if someone talks about η-conversion, or confused if they talk about lifting a type.

• I am quite comfortable with lazy data structures and with higher-order functional constructs such as parser combinators. In fact, I wrote a book about them.

• I'm not sure I should admit this, but I'm the person who explained why monads are like burritos.

If you're interested, or if you know someone who might be, here's my résumé. please feel free to pass it around or to ask me questions at mjd@pobox.com.

Thanks for your kind attention.

Big restriction: I live in Philadelphia and cannot relocate. I have no objection to occasional travel, and a long history of sucessful remote work.

[ Addendum 20220209: If you emailed me and haven't heard back, it's only because response was overwhelming and I haven't gotten to your message yet. Thank you! ]

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Cleaning up 404 errors

Yesterday I went through the last few months of web server logs, used them to correct some bad links in my blog articles.

Today I checked the logs again and all the "page not found" errors are caused by people attacking my WordPress and PHP installations. So, um, yay, I guess?

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Shitpost roundup, 2018-06

Volume was way down in May and June, mainly because of giant work crises that ate all my energy. I will try to get back on track now.

May

June

In the past I have boldfaced posts that seemed more likely to be of general interest. None of these seem likely to be of general interest.

Also, I think it is time to stop posting these roundups. By now everyone who wants to know about shitpost.plover.com is aware of it and can follow along without prompting. So I expect this will be the last of these posts. Shitposting will continue, but without these summaries.

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Shitpost roundup, 2018-04

Last month I regretted making only 22 posts but I promised:

April will be better; I'm on pace to break the previous volume record, and I've also been doing a good job of promoting better posts to the major leagues.

I blew it! I tied the previous volume record. But I also think I did do a decent job promoting the better posts. Usually I look over the previous month's posts and pick out two or three that seem to be of more interest than the others. Not this month! They are all shit, except the one ghostwritten by Anette Gordon-Reed. If this keeps up, I will stop doing these monthly roundup posts.

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Shitpost roundup, 2018-03

Here is a list of March's shitposts. I don't recall what my excuse was for there being only 22, but in my defense, I will add that they were almost all terrible. There was one decent math post I maybe should have promoted.

(And also Nancy and Squid, which was awesome, and also 100% Grade A shitpost. I thought when I posted it a crowd of people would burst into the room and carry me off on their shoulders. Instead, nobody seems to have noticed.)

April will be better; I'm on pace to break the previous volume record, and I've also been doing a good job of promoting better posts to the major leagues.

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Shitpost roundup, 2018-02

Here is a list of February's shitposts, later than usual, but who cares? Boldface indicates the articles that may (may) be of more general interest (ha). I think that I did a better job of noticing when a post wasn't shitty enough and promoting it, pre-publication, to this blog, so you will have seen all the better stuff already.

I'm pleased, volume over January is slightly up, and quality is definitely down, especially in the last half of the month. But I posted on only 21 of 28 days; I'll have to work on that.

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Shitpost roundup, 2018-01

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

Last month I said:

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 think I am doing better. I will continue my efforts to emphasize quantity over quality, with a multi-pronged approach:

• Faster production with lower production standards
• Less filtering of possible topics for relevance, general interest, or almost anything else
• Promote insufficiently shitty posts to The Universe of Discourse

It will be a struggle, but I resolve to do my best!

Here is a list of January's shitposts. Boldface indicates the articles that may (may) be of more general interest (ha). There are fewer of these than last month because I promoted several of the better ones, so you have seen them already.

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Shitpost roundup, 2017-12

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.

• Drat, I messed up a shitpost
• Лох-Несского
• Bitcoin
• Mmm, sandalwood
• “Oh, you ate that?”
• My rule about eating everything
• Shitpost academy
• Life in the 21st Century
• Hey, that's not how that is meant to be used!
• Mmmm baked potatoes: Making a good baked potato takes a lot of time. It doesn't require skill or attention, just patience.
• Vegan dominatrix supplies
• Fiona sings Frosty
• Lesbians on my desktop
• Mathematical ladders
• A non-coincidence
• Jingle Bell Rock
• Stuff the kids know and stuff they don't
• Non-straight ladders
• Computers suck: episode 17787 of 31279: My epic journey into the wild and uncharted jungles of the Linux keyboard system. Or should I say systems.
• Testing for divisibility by 99
• More mathematical shitposting
• The Physical Layer: Two programmers discuss the OSI network model.
• Metonymy
• Too many suffixes
• Alphabet game: One of the games that Toph and I sometimes play in the car is the “Alphabet Game”: You try to spot the letter ‘A’, then ‘B’, and so on, and get through to ‘Z’ before you reach your destination.
• The spelling of “Dominus”
• Hot sake
• The Physical Layer: Alternative punch line
• Comparing heaps of beans
• Petits fours
• Fornax

I plan to continue to post monthly summaries here.

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Shitpost roundup, 2017-11

As I mentioned before, I have started another blog, called Content-type: text/shitpost. While I don't recommend that you read it regularly, you might want to scan over this list of the articles from November 2017 to see if anything catches your eye.

• FIRST POST!!1!
• The Vampire Flying Frog
• “As the crow flies”
• The ephod
• The uselessness of consistency proofs
• Bertrand Russell's Slack channel
• The Zimbabwean coup
• Non-star multiplication operators
• Canaan Banana
• Shitposting on Math StackExchange
• Colored beans
• How I rate restaurants
• A problem that looks harder than it is
• Dirty jokes that are orientation and gender nonspecific
• My secret identity
• My cute fantasy
• The Wise Men of Princeton
• The Hot Potato
• The fiber guys are here!
• The Hot Potato (addendum)
• Stealing Club
• The kids disappear and then come back
• Head Over Feet
• Intriguing trending hashtags
• Character-building exercises
• What’s the most annoying question to ask a nun in 1967?
• The Garden Court Eatery
• Mixing up left and right
• Mmmm fries
• A vector space over a field of scalars
• People are more than one person
• The most annoying question to ask a nun, explained
• Coma collective
• Computers suck: episode 17771 of 31279
• Abutment for multiplication and other things
• Today's 419 scam is…
• Abutments
• More multiplication by abutment
• Who is a convicted rapist?
• Code reviews
• Bjarne Stroustrup's many crimes against programming
• Colorado Appeals Court goes to Middle School
• Do NOT Resuscitate

I plan to continue to post monthly summaries here.

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My new blog

Over the years many people have written to me to tell me they liked my blog but that I should update it more often. Now those people can see if they were correct. I suspect they will agree that they weren't.

I find that, especially since I quit posting to Twitter, there is a lot of random crap that I share with my co-workers, friends, family, and random strangers that they might rather do without. I needed a central dumping ground for this stuff. I am not going to pollute The Universe of Discourse with this material so I started a new blog, called Content-Type: text/shitpost. The title was inspired by a tweet of Reid McKenzie that suggested that there should be a text/shitpost content type. I instantly wanted to do more with the idea.

WARNING: Shitposts may be pointless, incomplete, poorly considered, poorly researched, offensive, vague, irritating, or otherwise shitty. The label is on the box. If you find yourself wanting to complain about the poor quality of a page you found on a site called shitpost.plover.com, maybe pause for a moment and consider what your life has come to.

I do not recommend that you check it out.

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The junk heap of (blog) history
A couple of years ago, I said:

I have an idea that I might inaugurate a new section of the blog, called "junkheap", where unfinished articles would appear after aging in the cellar for three years, regardless what sort of crappy condition they are in.

Here's a summary of the cellared items from February-April 2006, with the reasons why each was abandoned:

1. Two different ways to find a number n so that if you remove the final digit of n and append it to the front, the resulting numeral represents 2n. (Nothing wrong with this one; I just don't care for it for some reason.)

2. The first part in a series on Perl's little-used features: single-argument bless (Introduction too long, I couldn't figure out what my point was, I never finished writing the article, and the problems with single-argument bless are well-publicized anyway.)

3. A version of my article about Baroque writing style, but with all the s's replaced by ſ's. (Do I need to explain?)

4. Frequently-asked questions about my blog. (Too self-indulgent.)

5. The use of mercury in acoustic-delay computer memories of the 1950's. (Interesting, but needs more research. I pulled a lot of details out of my butt, intending to follow them up later. But didn't.)

6. Thoughts on the purpose and motivation for the set of real numbers. Putatively article #2 in a series explaining topology. (Unfinished; I just couldn't quite get it together, although I tried repeatedly.)

I invite your suggestions for what to do with this stuff. Mailing list? Post brief descriptions in the blog and let people request them by mail? Post them on a wiki and let people hack on them? Stop pretending that my every passing thought is so fascinating that even my failures are worth reading?

The last one is the default, and I apologize for taking up your valuable time with this nonsense.

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Where's that blog?
I haven't posted in a couple of weeks, and I was wondering why. So I took a look at the test version of the blog, which displays all the unpublished articles as well as the published ones, and the reason was obvious: In the past ten days I've written seven articles that are unfinished or that didn't work. Usually only about a third of my articles flop; this month a whole bunch flopped in a row. What can I say? Sometimes the muse delivers, and sometimes she doesn't.

I said a while back that I would try to publish more regularly, and not wait until every article was perfect. But I don't want to publish the unfinished articles yet. So I thought instead I'd publish a short summary of what I've been thinking about lately.

I hope to get at least one or two of these done by the end of the month.

Simplified Poker

This got me thinking again of something I started writing up last year and never finished: The game of "Simplified Poker", which was an attempt to do for Poker what the λ-calculus does for computation: the simplest possible model that nevertheless captures all the essential features of the original. Simplified Poker is played with an infinite deck in which half the cards are kings and half are jacks. Each hand contains only two cards. Nevertheless, bluffing is still possible.

Buy What is the Name of this Book? from Bookshop.org (with kickback) (without kickback)

The Annoying Boxes Puzzle

It's primarily waiting for me to take a photograph to accompany the puzzle.

[ Addendum 20160319: I did eventually post this, but it took me until 2015 to do it: The annoying boxes puzzle. ]

Undefined behavior

[ Addendum 20071029: This is ready now. ]

Buy Tootle from Bookshop.org (with kickback) (without kickback)

Tootle

Periodicity without Fourier Series

One way to do this is to take the Fourier transform of the data. For various reasons, I don't like this technique, and I'm trying to invent something new. I think I have what I want, although it took several tries to find it. Unfortunately, the blog posting data shows no periodicity whatsoever.

Emacs and auto-mode-alist

Van der Waerden's problem

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Sub-blogs and the math sub-blog
I notice that a number of people have my blog included in lists of "math blogs", which is fine with me, but I got a bit worried when I saw someone's web site that actually includes a lot of "math blog" articles, including mine, which is only ever about one-fourth math, the rest being given over to random other stuff. So the "math blog" section of this guy's web site is carrying my ill-informed articles about evolutionary biology and notes about the Frances the Badger books.

If you really do want just the math articles for some reason, you can subscribe to the feeds at http://blog.plover.com/math/index.rss or http://blog.plover.com/math/index.atom. I've been generating these sub-feed files since the blog began, and I know nobody uses them. But perhaps someone would like to.

Similarly, there are sub-feeds for other subsections of the blog, for example "physics". Most of these topic areas receive many fewer updates than does the "math" section:

64	math
16	lang
14	physics
14	oops
14	linogram
14	book
14	prog
10	bio
7	lang/etym
6	meta

Personally I feel that the eclecticism of the blog is one of its attractions, and I gather that a lot of other people do too, but perhaps not everyone agrees.

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Woodrow Wilson on bloggers
Last weekend my family and I drove up to New York. On the way we stopped in the Woodrow Wilson Service Area on the New Jersey Turnpike, which has a little plaque on the wall commemorating Woodrow Wilson and providing some quotations, such as:

Uncompromising thought is the luxury of the closeted recluse.

(Part of a speech at the University of Tennessee in 17 June, 1890).

Bloggers beware; Woodrow Wilson has your number.

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ALT attributes in formula image elements
I have a Blosxom plugin that recognizes <formula>...</formula> elements in my blog article files, interprets the contents as TeX, converts the results to a gif file, and then replaces the whole thing with an inline image tag to inline the gif file.

Today I fixed the plugin to leave the original TeX source code in the ALT attribute of the IMG tag. I should have done this in the first place.

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State of the Blog 2006
This is the end of the first year of my blog. The dates on the early articles say that I posted a few in 2005, but they are deceptive. I didn't want a blog with only one post in it, so I posted a bunch of stuff that I had already written, and backdated it to the dates on which I had written it. The blog first appeared on 8 January, 2006, and this was the date on which I wrote its first articles.

Output

The longest article was the one about finite extension fields of Z₂; the shortest was the MadHatterDay commemorative. Other long articles included some math ones (metric spaces, the Pólya-Burnside theorem) and some non-math ones (how Forbes magazine made a list of the top 20 tools and omitted the hammer, do aliens feel disgust?).

I drew, generated, or appropriated about 300 pictures, diagrams, and other illustrations, plus 66 mathematical formulas. This does not count the 50 pictures of books that I included, but it does include 108 little colored squares for the article on the Pólya-Burnside counting lemma.

Financial

None of the book links earned me any money from kickbacks. However, the blog did generate some income. When Aaron Swartz struck oil, he offered to give away money to web sites that needed it. Mine didn't need it, but a little later he published a list of web sites he'd given money to, and I decided that I was at least as deserving as some of them. So I stuck a "donate" button on my blog and invited Aaron to use it. He did. Thanks, Aaron!

I now invite you to use that button yourself. Here are two versions that both do the same thing:

I could not decide whether to go with the cute and pathetic begging approach (shown right) or the brusque and crass demanding approach (left).

My MacArthur Fellowship check has apparently been held up in the mail.

Popularity

The followup to the Design Patterns article was very popular also. Other popular articles were on risk, the envelope paradox, the invention of the = sign, and ten science questions every high school graduate should be able to answer.

My own personal favorites are the articles about alien disgust, the manufacture of round objects, and what makes π so peculiar. In that last one, I think I was skating on the thin edge of crackpotism.

The article about Forbes' tool list was mentioned in The New York Times.

The blog attracted around five hundred email messages, most of which were intelligent and thoughtful, and most of which I answered. But my favorite email message was from the guy who tried to convince me that rock salt melts snow because it contains radioactive potassium.

System administration

Moving the blog has probably cost me a lot of readers. I know from the logs that many of them have not moved from newbabe to Dreamhost. Traffic on the new site just after the move was about 25% lower than on the old site just before the move. Oh well.

If the blog hadn't moved so many times, it would be listed by Technorati as one of the top ten blogs on math and science, and one of the top few thousand overall. As it is, the incoming links (which are what Technorati uses to judge blog importance) are scattered across three different sites, so it appears to be three semi-popular blogs rather than one very popular blog. This would bother me, if Technorati rankings weren't so utterly meaningless.

Policy

I think I've upheld this vow pretty well, and although there have been occasions on which I've called people knuckleheaded assholes, it has always been either a large group (like Biblical literalists) or people who were dead (like this pinhead) or both.

Another vow I made was that I wasn't going to include any tedious personal crap, like what music I was listening to, or whether the grocery store was out of Count Chocula this week. I think I did okay on that score. There are plenty of bloggers who will tell you about the fight they had with their girlfriend last night, but very few that will analyze abbreviations in Medieval Latin. So I have the Medieval Latin abbreviations audience pretty much to myself. I am a bit surprised at how thoroughly I seem to have communicated my inner life, in spite of having left out any mention of Count Chocula. This is a blog of what I've thought, not what I've done.

What I didn't post this year

The longest of these unpublished articles was written some time after my article on the envelope paradox hit the front page of Reddit. Most of the Reddit comments were astoundingly obtuse. There were about nine responses of the type "That's cute, but the fallacy is...", each one proposing a different fallacy. All of the proposed fallacies were completely wrong; most of them were obviously wrong. (There is no fallacy; the argument is correct.) I decided against posting this rebuttal article for several reasons:

• It wouldn't have convinced anyone who wasn't already convinced, and might have unconvinced someone who was. I can't lay out the envelope paradox argument any more briefly or clearly than I did; all I can do is make the explanation longer.

• It came perilously close to violating the rule about insulting people who are still alive. I'm not sure how the rule applies to anonymous losers on Reddit, but it's probably better to err on the side of caution. And I wasn't going to be able to write the article without insulting them, because some of them were phenomenally stupid.

• I wasn't sure anyone but me would be interested in the details of what a bunch of knuckleheaded lowlifes infest the Reddit comment board. Many of you, for example, read Slashdot regularly, and see dozens of much more ignorant and ill-considered comments every day.

• How much of a cretin would I have to be to get in an argument with a bunch of anonymous knuckleheads on a computer bulletin board? It's like trying to teach a pig to sing. Well, okay, I did get in an argument with them over on Reddit; that was pretty stupid. And then I did write the rebuttal article, which was at least as stupid, but which I can at least ascribe to my seething cauldron of bile. But it's never too late to stop acting stupid, and at least I stopped before I cluttered up my beautiful blog with a four-thousand-word rebuttal.

The article about metric spaces was supposed to be one of a three-part series, which I still hope to finish eventually. I made several attempts to write another part in this series, about the real numbers and why we have them at all. This requires explanation, because the reals are mathematically and philosophically quite artificial and problematic. (It took me a lot of thought to convince myself that they were mathematically inevitable, and that the aliens would have them too, but that is another article.) The three or four drafts I wrote on this topic total about 2,100 words, but I still haven't quite got it where I want it, so it will have to wait.

I wrote 2,000 words about oddities in my brain, what it's good at and what not, and put it on the shelf because I decided it was too self-absorbed. I wrote a complete "frequently-asked questions" post which answered the (single) question "Why don't you allow comments?" and then suppressed it because I was afraid it was too self-absorbed. Then I reread it a few months later and thought it was really funny, and almost relented. Then I read it again the next month and decided it was better to keep it suppressed. I'm not indecisive; I'm just very deliberate.

I finished a 2,000-word article about how to derive the formulas for least-squares linear regression and put it on the shelf because I decided that it was boring. I finished a 1,300-word article about quasiquotation in Lisp and put it on the shelf because I decided it was boring. (Here's the payoff from the quasiquotation article: John McCarthy, the inventor of Lisp, took both the concept and the name directly from W.V.O. Quine, who invented it in 1940.)

Had I been writing this blog in 2005, there would have been a bunch of articles about Sir Thomas Browne, but I was pretty much done with him by the time I started the blog. (I'm sure I will return someday.) There would have been a bunch of articles about John Wilkins's book on the Philosophical Language, and some on his book about cryptography. (The Philosophical Language crept in a bit anyway.) There would have been an article about Charles Dickens's book Great Expectations, which I finished reading about a year and a half ago.

An article about A Christmas Carol is in the works, but I seem to have missed the seasonal window on that one, so perhaps I'll save it for next December. I wrote an article about how to calculate the length of the day, and writing a computer progam to tell time by the old Greek system, which divides the daytime into twelve equal hours and the nighttime into twelve equal hours, so that the night hours are longer than the day ones in the winter, and shorter in the summer. But I missed the target date (the solstice) for that one, so it'll have to wait until at least the next solstice. I wrote part of an article about Hangeul (the Korean alphabet), planning to publish it on Hangeul Day (the Koreans have a national holiday celebrating Hangeul) but I couldn't find the quotations I wanted from 1445, so I put it on the shelf. This week I'm reading Gari Ledyard's doctoral thesis, The Korean Language Reform of 1446, so I may acquire more information about that and be able to finish the article. (I highly recommend the Ledyard thing; it's really well-written.) I recently wrote about 1,000 words about Vernor Vinge's new novel Rainbows End, but that's not finished yet.

A followup to the article about why you don't have one ear in the middle of your face is in progress. It's delayed by two things: first, I made a giant mistake in the original article, and I need to correct it, but that means I have to figure out what the mistake is and how to correct it. And second, I have to follow up on a number of fascinating references about directional olfaction.

Sometimes these followups eventually arrive,as the one about ssh-agent did, and sometimes they stall. A followup to my early article about the nature of transparency, about the behavior of light, and the misconception of "the speed of light in glass", ran out of steam after a page when I realized that my understanding of light was so poor that I would inevitably make several gross errors of fact if I finished it.

I spent a lot of the summer reading books about inconsistent mathematics, including Graham Priest's book In Contradiction, but for some reason no blog articles came of it. Well, not exactly. What has come out is an unfinished 1,230-word article against the idea that mathematics is properly understood as being about formal systems, an unfinished 1,320-word article about the ubiquity of the Grelling-Nelson paradox, an unfinished 1,110-word article about the "recursion theorem" of computer science, and an unfinished 1,460-word article about paraconsistent logic and the liar paradox.

I have an idea that I might inaugurate a new section of the blog, called "junkheap", where unfinished articles would appear after aging in the cellar for three years, regardless what sort of crappy condition they are in. Now that the blog is a year old, planning something two years out doesn't seem too weird.

I also have an ideas file with a couple hundred notes for future articles, in case I find myself with time to write but can't think of a topic. Har.

Surprises

I was not expecting that so many of my articles would take the form "ABCDEFG. But none of this is really germane to the real point of this article, which is ... HIJKLMN." But the more articles I write in this style, the more comfortable I am with it. Perhaps in a hundred years graduate students will refer to an essay of this type, with two loosely-coupled sections of approximately the same length, linked by an apologetic phrase, as "Dominus-style".

Wrong wrong wrong!

However, I do know that the phrase "I don't know" (and variations, like "did not know") appears 67 times, in 44 of the 161 articles. I would like to think that this is one of the things that will set my blog apart from others, and I hope to improve these numbers in the coming years.

Thanks

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favicon.ico Results
A couple of days ago I asked for suggestions for a favicon icon to represent the blog in people's shortcut menus. There were only two responses, but they were both very helpful, and solved the problem.

My first thought was, of course, to use an octopus, but I immediately rejected this idea since I didn't think I would be able to draw a recognizable octopus in 16×16 pixels. Neil Kandalgaonkar was braver than I was: .

However, the concept I decided to go with was suggested by David Eppstein, who provided this attractive interpretation: . To explain this, I need to explain my domain name, which I haven't done here before.

For nine years I was an independent consultant, working under the name Plover Systems. Why Plover? Many people assume that it is an abbreviation for "Perl lover"; this is not the case. The plover domain predates my involvement with Perl. (Some people have also interpreted it as "piss lover", a veiled statement of a fetishistic attraction to urination. It is not.)

A plover is a small bird. Typically, they make their nests on the seashore. The Egyptian plover is the little bird that is reputed to snatch food scraps from between the teeth of the crocodile. The American golden plover migrates all the way from Alaska to South America, and sometimes across the ocean to Europe.

Immediately prior to my becoming an independent consultant and setting up Plover Systems and the plover.com domain, I was employed as the senior systems engineer for Pathfinder, the Time Warner web site. I did not like this job very much. After I quit, I joked that my company had grown too big, so I downsized most of the management and employees, divested the magazine business, and cut the organization's mission back to core competences. Time Warner, the subsidiary I spun off to publish the magazines, was very large. I named my new, lean, trim company "Plover" because the plover is small and agile.

There is another reason for "Plover". For about thirty years, I have been a devoted fan of the old computer game Adventure. When time came to choose a domain name, I wanted to choose something with an Adventure connection. Here the obvious choices are xyzzy, which was already taken, and plugh, which is ugly. Both of these are magic words which, uttered at the correct spot, will teleport the player to another location. The game has a third such magic word, which is "plover"; from the right place, it transports the player to the "Plover room":

You're in a small chamber lit by an eerie green light. An extremely narrow tunnel exits to the west. A dark corridor leads NE.

The Plover room is so-called because it contains "an emerald the size of a plover's egg". A plover's egg is not very big, as eggs go, because the plover is not a very large bird, as birds go. But an emerald the size of a plover's egg is enormous, as emeralds go. The description is a reference to an off-color joke that was current in the early 1970's when Adventure was written: a teenage girl, upon hearing that the human testicle is the size of a plover's egg, remarks "Oh, so that's how big a plover's egg is." I think this was somewhat more risqué in 1974 than it is today.

For his contribution, M. Eppstein has won a free two-year subscription to The Universe of Discourse. Neil Kandalgaonkar gets the runner-up prize of two free six-month subscriptions, to run concurrently. Thank you both!

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favicon.ico
I'm getting hundreds of failed requests for favicon.ico. I need to come up with a good-looking icon for the blog. Since the blog isn't about Higher-Order Perl, I don't want to use the HOP cover or the HOP quilt block icon .

I have not had any good ideas. So I am asking LazyNet.

The best suggestion will win a free one-year subscription to The Universe of Discourse blog. If the winner supplies an icon that I can actually use, the prize will be increased to a free two-year subscription.

Any suggestions?

[ Addendum 20061120: David Eppstein responded immediately with , which I will explain in a future article that summarizes the suggestions. M. Eppstein's suggestion is good enough that I am comfortable installing it right away. But don't let that stop you from coming up with your own suggestion. ]

[ Addendum 20061120: Neil Kandalgaonkar has contributed . Thank you, Neil! ]

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About me

I am Mark Jason Dominus. I like to read, and I try to remember what I've read. I am an amateur mathematician, but not the angle-trisecting kind.

In addition to mathematics, I am interested in a great many other things. I don't know very much about any one thing but I do know a little bit about a lot of different things, and I like to think this makes me able to see connections between things that specialists might not notice. I'm the kind of person who gets on a bus and takes it to the last stop, just to see where it goes.

I have worked as a professional computer programmer since around 1987, and intermittently as a writer and as a teacher. I'm best at teaching, and I like it the best, but the programming pays more.

I may be best known for my book Higher-Order Perl, published in 2005 by Morgan Kaufmann, and for my other work in Perl. But as a programmer I consider myself uncommitted to any particular language or system. As with everything else, I try to go for breadth rather than for depth.

I live in Philadelphia with my spouse. We have two daughters who are known on this blog (but not in real life) as Katara and Toph.

My blog, The Universe of Discourse has existed in one form or another since 1994, and in its current form since 2006.

My current project is to read every book ever written.

To contact me, you can email mjd@pobox.com.

Ask me anything.

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