misteranthropic » /insoluble

the annual company christmas party

mAtt — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:05:54 +0000

ahem. below is a mini-post i had saved back in my insoluble.net days, but had a crisis of conscience (and of employment) about publishing, so it never saw the light of day. it survived The Great Darkness Between The Blogs, and thusly i am able to present it to you now, in all its minimal majesty:

people attending: hundreds
alcohol units consumed: thousands
alcohol units consumed by me: 0.1
alcohol units needed to have enjoyed the band: n
alcohol units needed to kill an adult horse: n+1

the beautifulest things

mAtt — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 05:08:00 +0000

in my head, almost daily, i go on these little trips. how i get there i don't know, but each trip is always beautiful and always ends at one of the following.

i urge you to read at least a couple of these. true: i will never know whether you did, but i will sleep easier knowing i asked.

the mandelbrot set
when we finally isolate the higgs boson, we will smash it apart and julia will emerge and open her eyes.

kolmogorov complexity
and not just because it links to the mandelbrot set.

the lorenz attractor
credo, sine ratione, reality is fractal. there is no smallest grain.

quaternions
these little guys are all tangled up with my thoughts of the grand unification theory. it's out there, and it will extract a terrible price, you mark my words.

hyperbolic geometry
what a difference one little axiom makes: the universe (at one extreme) ends in fire, or (at the other) in ice, or (at the lack of extreme) neither.

the normal distribution
every, repeat every field of knowledge can be seen better when cast in the warm light of the bell curve.

euler's identity
cthulhu fhtagn euler—it is the source of his power.

the laplace transform
as the article says, these buggers will not only drastically reduce the time and effort required to solve the problem, but will fundamentally change the way you think about the problem.

turing machines
reductionism! reductionism! reductionism! HOW MANY TIMES MUST I TELL YOU

the unary magic square
and, of course, it works with arbitrarily lonely values of one.

separatiőn
i saved the best for last. this is basically the holy grail of the mathematical universe. (i'm a simple guy, and i don't say that with pretense.)

p.s. happy birthday, harry.

every eager impulse

mAtt — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 00:49:20 +0000

it starts late in the afternoon with google news linking to a story on slashdot. the slashdot article has an interesting discussion. one of the posters has a sig linking to xkcd, reminding me i haven't had my xkcd fix in a while. during my time there i check the blag, and engorge myself in one particularly stimulating exploration of ludicrously large numbers

at this point my memory becomes slightly fuzzy

and suddenly it's like a quarter to five the following morning and i'm in my underwear with my old college texts out and i'm scribbling notes about exponential towers and *omorphisms whilst humming 'woman in love.' the internet is a gateway to the darkness waiting deep inside.

i don't deserve my dreams

mAtt — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 07:06:27 +0000

any fool with a map can see the two masses would fit together perfectly—but for the ocean between them.

put on some music on

mAtt — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 04:42:18 +0000

is it telling that i find my greatest pleasure when getting shiny things?

concurrently i find my greatest pain when later that night shiny things first work, then almost work, then utterly fail to work, and then so thoroughly bugger my windows installation that it requires a rollback to prior restoration point. if i could i'd go back in time and just tell myself not to take the thing out of disk mode for any reason whatsoever and save myself many bitter tears of frustration.

bottom line: there is beauty in its utter simplicity. on or off. louder or quieter. linearly or meanderingly.

i thought my wife's nano was small, but seriously. i've had dreams that weighed more than this, and still held less data.

figures that shape our world

mAtt — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 02:53:05 +0000

number of birds mercy-killed, month-to-date: 1

damn cats.

yes but in which direction

mAtt — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 02:39:23 +0000

and in my best behavior i am really just like him
look beneath the floorboards for the secrets i have hid
-sufjan stevens, john wayne gacy, jr.

i've been thinking about this a lot, recently; do not mistake brevity for flippancy.

if M is mood, the magnitude of dM/dt here is so large as to be beyond mortal comprehension.

exploding bishops

mAtt — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 04:00:15 +0000

to a regular chess game, add ninety-six additional squares and two additional players. mix with infuriating randomness. heat until simmering with rage—the fastest path to rage is losing your queen, king's bishop, and two pawns to ted's fireball on the second turn; serve cold.

this double-variant of chess is perhaps the awesomest thing, ever. four players, and insane strategy-breaking cards. chess is to this … this beast as whack-a-mole is to global thermonuclear war.

oh, did i mention we built the board from legos? we are infinitely adaptable, you see.

an open letter to a particular girl in my office

mAtt — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 03:58:20 +0000

PARTICULAR GIRL stop having your hand on your extreme lower back when you walk by my cubicle (six times a day you make it momentarily hard for me to concentrate), and stop always running into me and walking into the break room or the hall or the lobby when i was clearly there first, and stop doing that thing that turns my mouth all gluey. you make my working conditions intolerable.

as it should be

mAtt — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 07:09:46 +0000

the big things get in the way of the little things.

there have been big things lately. no important things, dig, no interesting things; things neither good nor bad, but simply big.

things will be as they ever were. and perhaps a broken habit will be mended.

here endeth the monthly post.

comprehensive life update

mAtt — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 06:13:27 +0000

i've logged 33 hours so far this week. it's monday.