war

Laser pointers have been banned in "some Australian state" after a number of idiots pointed them at aircraft cockpits. Now, the article isn't very clear on wether all laser pointers are banned, or just high-powered ones that can really blind pilots. For instance, the crappy ones that I can get here for around half a buck couldn't blind anything more than 10 meters away. So instead of just arresting and convicting the idiots who endanger passengers' lives, the state just bans laser pointers alltogether. What next, banning forks because one can stab people with them? Should we eat with Chinese sticks then instead of forks? What if someone finds a criminal use for chopsticks then? Eat with our bare hands of course. Then someone uses their hands to beats up somebody else to death and we all get to wear little remote-controlled collars that give you a paralysing shock whenever the state says so. Maybe that would be good. But until then, what if lasers get banned in my country as well? Maybe I want to build a long-range laser data transceiver. Will I be able to do so without a license in 5 years time? Will I be able to get a license then? Will a high-school hacker with reasonable technical knowledge but no engineering degree be able to get such a license? This sucks.
Then I learn that Hillary Clinton, who is ugly, said that the U.S. could wipe Iran off the face of the Earth. Well of course they could! The U.S. can wipe anything out, including the whole planet. So can Russia, and a couple other countries can do some serious damage. We all know that. Do they want to wipe everything out? No. There was no Cold War, there was no Cuban missile crisis, in my humble opinion. No one in their right mind would have launched their nuclear arsenal against another nuclear power. It was all just bluffing and political bullshit, regardless of what the press or Discovery says. But I'm probably wrong. I was walking through the Polytechnic's campus this morning and I was thinking... scientists don't understand life, and maybe it's good they don't. When humans understand something, they tend to devalue it. For instance, we (the civilized world) no longer attribute lightning to some gods being angry, and we no longer fear it and sacrifice animals to calm the gods down or something. Well. Kind of. So it's lost its value. Now it's just a meteorological phenomenon. Yeah, some may find it beautiful, sure, but it's not divine anymore. Its value has diminished. Solar and lunar eclipses, same shit. Sure, there are still a lot of uncivilized or semi-civilized people who hold a wide variety of beliefs regarding these, so these phenomena have a much greater emotional value to them than to us. Steam engines (think the ancient Greek spinning ball that was used for magic and stuff). Whatever. So when we understand life, when we begin engineering life in the lab for good, then we'd have lost all respect for it. Of course, big political leaders never had any respect for life. Think Hitler, Stalin, the Crusades, the World Wars, the Roman, Otoman, British, Spanish empires, whatever. We can wipe Iran off the face of the Earth, sure. Yeah I also hate oppresive regimes, I hate oppresive cultures, but you can't just kill everybody who's not as civilized as yourself from certain points of view. Maybe they're more civilized in ways you fail to see. And finally, maybe there are space aliens out there who are far more civilized than we are, and they don't go around killing us just because well, we suck. And until the U.S. and Russia and France and the others scrap all their nukes, they have no moral right whatsoever to accuse Iran of wanting to have their own. Fuck Iran, fuck the U.S., fuck Australia, fuck the human race, peace already.

earth hour

This Saturday some idiots and newspeople asked me to turn off the lights for one hour, along with Sydney and some other big cities that were going to do the same thing. Images of people sitting at restaurant tables around a candle as the lights went off flashed around the TV screen all evening long. "Turn off the lights and use candles" seemed to be the message. Well, that's insultingly stupid. That's not an invitation to decrease pollution, but an invitation to return to the dark ages! Don't get me wrong, I hate pointless artificial lighting. I absolutely hate not being able to see the stars and other astronomical objects because of all the fucking lights. Who the hell needs lighting at 2 am in the night? That's a total waste of electricity and a fart in the face of all astronomers and stargazers everywhere. But candles? Let's take a look at the luminous efficiency of candles versus modern lighting. The humble incandescent light has a terrible efficiency of only 2.5%, because of all the thermal radiation it emits, only a small part is visible. The more advanced fluorescent gas-discharge lamp can reach 15%. LEDs are currently worse, contrary to popular belief. Low-pressure sodium vapor lamps can reach 27% efficiency, which is huge. They have an added advantage of being easily filtered out when doing astronomy, because their yellow color has a very narrow spectrum. Take a power station efficiency of let's say 10%, which is a very, very low estimate, stick an incandescent light bulb at its output and you get an overall efficiency of 0.25% from coal or whatever noxious fuel you're using to pure light. Now take a candle and burn it, releasing carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, soot and useless heat into the atmosphere, get an efficiency of about 0.04% (so that's more than 5 times worse than the most inefficient coal-to-light technology in current use) and brag about how great an environmentalist you are. Then smell your farts and comment on their exquisite flavor. Then exchange farts with all your brain-dead environmentalist friends who don't know shit about physics, chemistry or biology and brag and lick each others' asses. And celebrate Earth Hour.

the drunken man problem

The Original Drunken Man Problem

A drunk man is standing next to a pole at moment t_0=0.
At each moment t_s,k = k * tau the man takes a step in a random direction.
Find the most probable distance between the man and his initial starting position at time t.
For simplicity assume a constant tau = 1 second and all steps equal to 1 metre.

Elaborating on the Problem

An inebriated individual stumbles out a bar at moment t_0=0.
At each t_s,k = k * tau the guy takes a step in a direction given by angle alpha.
Every p steps alpha changes to a random direction then remains constant.
p follows a Poisson distribution with lambda = 4.
The distance travelled during one step follows a normal distribution with mu = 0.5 m and sigma^2 = 0.5 m^2.
To complicate matters further, upon colliding with the bar wall a new alpha is selected.
Find the most probable distance travelled at time t.
Then assume a normal distribution for tau too.

science fiction

"Captain, we've lost optical output in the converters in room 100!"
"My god! The molecular reactors cannot function without sustained input from room 100! The life support systems are in danger! Not to mention the crew being unable to perform their duty without proper environmental conditions in the waste dispoal facility!
"I agree, the situation is looking pretty grim. What should I do, Captain?"
"Quickly, energize the emission coils!"
"Coil temperature is reaching 3000 Kelvins, Sir."
"Good. Now decrease the converter frequency to get closer to resonance."
"Decreasing operating frequency 35%... The positive-coefficent thermistors are heating up. No-go, sir. The power controller has detected an overvoltage in the resonant circuit and is shutting down."
"Yellow alert! Everyone prepare for emergency biostasis in case of environmental failure. Officer, reset the controller, move the frequency back up and wait for the thermistors to cool down."
"Done. The emission coils are operational. Increasing field strength to 900 volts per meter."
"Are the atoms responding?"
"Yes, we've got arc ignition. The resonance point is dropping... Hold on, the plasma is getting unstable! It's oscillating chaotically on a subsonic frequency! I can't keep it going! It's out, we've got another overload!"
"Reconfigure the overload threshold to 120% and retry the ignition sequence with a 30% increase in the ionizing field."
"Yes sir. Heating up the emission coils... field is increasing... we've got ignition... no, the plasma column is not holding."
"Try again with 50% field increase for 5 seconds."
"Trying... the protection network cannot hold much longer with all that power coming from the resonant circuit! We've got to get that plasma to increase in density or we're dead!"
[Officer 2 enters command deck] "Captain, the life support systems have shut down! The bioreactor has run out of input material! We need the crew to start shitting NOW!"
[Officer 3] Yes, besides, I can't hold it in much longer! We need to get that damned toilet fixed!
"Red alert! Everyone to the stasis cells now! Prepare for immediate hibernation on my signal. Officer, increase average power to 175% and switch to discontinuous mode."
"The pulse capacitors won't tolerate 175% sir. That's way over their nominal rating! We risk losing the entire converter assembly!"
"I'm willing to take that risk, officer. Quickly, short-circuit the output divider! Decrease the feedback ratio in the boost converter! Adjust the inductive reactance! Lock on that phase! Enhance those FETs!"
"Disabling overload threshold... Increasing main voltage... Setting target frequencies... Yes, we've got constant output! Decreasing power to nominal... Plasma is holding Sir! We've got optical output!"
"Good job, officer! Cancel alert. Everyone report to room 100 in decreasing order of intestinal discomfort. Go get yourself a beer officer!"
"Thank you Captain!"
"Captain's log supplemental. With the optical converters in room 100 fixed, crew morale is better than ever and everything is back to normal. These happenings have delayed our mission to Sirius 5, so unfortunately we missed our chance to meet Ambassador Kuux. Ironically this might have come as a blessing to us, as we learned from a Karbazian subspace transmission that Atheist
terrorists suicide-bombed the Agnostic conference room where the meeting was taking place. They detonated 300 micrograms of superfluid qvadrilithium crystals using a modified antiselenium primer. Both are undetectable to Karbazian bosonic spectrometry scanners. We sent our deepest most sincere regrets to the people of Sirius 5, but we sure are glad our asses weren't fried in the blast. Thus life goes on aboard the Sputnik V, leaving one to wonder just how has humankind evolved over millenia from flesh-eating, spear-wielding top-of-the-foodchainers to space-travelling woosies who won't even take a goddamned shit if there's no light in the toilet."

You will not

(spam me)
an essay* to ruin your day :D
*based on a true story.

You will not advertise anything I might not be interested in when sending me e-mail. I hate spam.
You will not use big fonts and bright colors for it. I hate spam.
You will not send me mass instant messages. I hate spam. Each message incurs a 3-point penalty with a 2-day exponential decay constant. 10 points and you get banned. No questions asked.
You are allowed to do whatever you want in your personal space: the status text.
But only if it's not scrolling or otherwise updating every second, flooding me with useless packets. I hate bandwith-munching spam. You get banned. No questions asked.
You will not post pictures when your comment on my web pages. They (a) will probably ruin the color scheme and (b) will almost certainly ruin the layout, because Web 2.0 sucks and people writing Web 2.0 CMSes and layout templates don't care to think of stuff like: hey, what if some guy posts a 1000-pixel-wide image here? I hate web sissies. And spam.
You will not send me animated xmas e-cards lifted from the web, chainletters, pictures of dogs or bunnies or whatever, jokes (I hate bad jokes) or anything else. I hate everything, and spam. You get banned.
You will not send me docx files.
You will not talk to me.
You will not look at me.
You will not talk about me.
You will not think of me.
You will pretend I do not exist.
Or else.

factoring the time

$ watch -n 60 factor \`date +%H%M\`

http://xkcd.com/247/

lambda * delta = crap

I was wandering aimlessly through the murky waters of the interwebs having forgotten my surfboard at home. After hours and hours of swimming around in the dark I stumbled upon this dude. From what I understood by skimming through the website, the guy is doing artsy spirity things using electromagnetism instead of classical stuff. Kind of cool because very few people do art and electronics and programming. So his scrying boards are programmable in Scheme which is supposed to be (his words): novel, highly expressive, dynamic, introspective, elegant, extensible, a {lightweight, mobile, active} means of describing worlds and processes, thus perfect for such stuff as scry-programming. Wow. So if you followed the Wikipedia link you might have seen that ugly lambda starring at you. After a quick skim through the article, I most sincerely can't find the elegance, expressiveness, beauty, simplicity or whatever this language is supposed to have. Before going to Wikipedia I first looked here, where else but the famous MIT. There's that damned lambda again. Why do people have to hail lambda calculus and build virtual statues and monuments to lambda calculus and kiss it in the ass like it's somekind of hyper-meta-rational godly piece of abstract shit? So I go to the big famous MIT and what do I see? A crappy black and white logo that's the most noisy logo I've seen in the last 6 months. (shiver!) Why can't people antialias their pictures? Is it so hard? Or is 1-pixel wide monochrome the new fad? There are tons of image editing packages out there that can do a proper picture resize, and many of them are free. But people still put out bad graphics because a)they're lazy or b)they don't care for proper sampling and quantization. Well of course they don't, they care for lambdity (lambdaness? lambdacity?). I took a quick look over the Scheme doxumentation on the MIT site and damn, I really can't call it simple, expressive, elegant, let alone introspective. But of course I can't argue about it not being statically scoped and properly tail-recursive, as its homepage states. So let's take the first decent example of Scheme code (is it called "code"? maybe it has some esoteric, intellectually pretentious name? am I perpetrating a terrible insult by calling it code and not self-referencing internally-reflexive external character-stringy description or something?) - so let's take this piece of code that's found on both Wikipedia and the MIT doxumentation and just post it here:

;;; The FACT procedure computes the factorial
;;; of a non-negative integer.
(define fact
(lambda (n)
 (if (= n 0)
     1        ;Base case: return 1
     (* n (fact (- n 1))))))

Man, now that's introspective!
The same code written in a proven, widely used, respectable, expressive language like C would sound a little bit like this:

/* If you do not know what a factorial is
 you should search it on Wikipedia or Google. */
int fact (int n)
{
assert(n >= 0); //jackass!
return n > 1 ? n * fact(n-1) : 1;
}

Much cleaner eh? Compare that to 1-2-3-4-5-SIX parenthesis. And their code screws up bigtime for negative numbers assuming n is a signed integer (I don't know, I hate lambda-anything, I suck), while mine doesn't. (Who would want to be using unsigned numbers by default anyway??) Mine also warns the careless programmer who feeds negative numbers to the factorial function. So not only is their canonical "hello world plus a little bit more" example ugly, it's also an infinite loop if my perfectly reasonable assumption of n being allowed to be negative as well as positive holds. Well, it might not be infinite because the hardware might not let it, but that's fucking bad practice. And after 5 more minutes of searching it seems that my assumption indeed holds, because according to the MIT documentation (- 3 4) gives -1. After another 5 minutes I opened up a GIMP script console and entered the code, then called the function with -1. It froze.

This more complicated example does the same shit but without (rather idiotically) wasting stack space with recursive function calls:

(define (fact n)
  (define (fact2 n m)
    (if (= n 0)
        m
        (fact2 (- n 1) (* m n))))
  (fact2 n 1)) 

Of course it has a pretentious name called proper tail-recursivity and Scheme is such a great, wonderful, revolutionary, INTROSPECTIVE =)) language for supporting it.
Here's the same shit in C, which also does not choke on negatives, unlike the code above.

int fact (int n)
{
int f;
for (f = 1; n > 1; f *= n--);
return f;
}

Fuck lambda calculus and fuck computational linguistics.