infundibulum

That more of the CSS design wonks of the world haven’t produced stylesheets for Wikipedia.

Hot damn!

Technorati Search: jill carroll

There’s one sidebar button I’ll be happy to take down. ☺

Boing Boing: Nontransitive dice — how to win every time

This is sooo counterintuitive that I had to convince myself by writing a program (in Python, as it happens):

from random import choice
import sys

verbose = 1

dice = {
 'A' : [0,0,4,4,4,4],
 'B' : [3,3,3,3,3,3],
 'C' : [6,6,2,2,2,2],
 'D' : [5,5,5,1,1,1]
}

trick = {
    'B' : 'A',
    'C' : 'B',
    'D' : 'C',
    'A' : 'D'
}

scoreboard = {
    'matches' : 0,
    'sucker' : 0,
    'con' : 0
}

def match():
    scoreboard['matches'] += 1
    sucker = choice(dice.keys())
    sucker_roll = choice(dice[sucker])
    if verbose: print 'sucker rolls %d on %s' % (sucker_roll,sucker)
    con = trick[sucker]
    con_roll = choice(dice[con])
    sucker_roll = choice(dice[sucker])
    if verbose: print 'con rolls %d on %s' % (con_roll,con)
    if  sucker_roll > con_roll:
        scoreboard['sucker'] += 1
    else:
        scoreboard['con'] += 1

def score():
    print 'nnTotal:'
    print "sucker wins: ",
    print "%.2f%% of matches" % (scoreboard['sucker'] / float(scoreboard['matches']))
    print "con wins: ",
    print "%.2f%% of matches" % (scoreboard['con'] / float(scoreboard['matches']))

for i in range(int(sys.argv[1])):
    match()

score()

Lo and behold:

$ python ntdice.py 1000
sucker rolls 5 on D
con rolls 6 on C
sucker rolls 2 on C
con rolls 3 on B
sucker rolls 5 on D
con rolls 2 on C
sucker rolls 1 on D
con rolls 6 on C
...
sucker rolls 1 on D
con rolls 2 on C
sucker rolls 3 on B
con rolls 0 on A
sucker rolls 2 on C
con rolls 3 on B

Total:
sucker wins:  0.33% of matches
con wins:  0.67% of matches

I suppose proving it to myself would involve some sigmas.

I added a couple of buttons in the sidebar about two wrongfully imprisoned people:

Jill Carroll is an American journalist who has been held captive in Iraq.

Hao Wu is a documentary film maker and contributor to Global Voices Online blogger who was recently detained by the Chinese government.

The web is our home; we all have a responsibility to raise awareness of crimes like these.

Technorati Tags: blogjill, jillcarroll, haowu

The Wikibooks project is about doing for textbooks what Wikipedia has done for the encyclopedia.

A great idea. Hasn’t gotten quite as much press as Wikipedia, but it seems to be moving right along. I think what it really needs is an incensed and frightened textbook author to write a whiny editorial in USAToday.

I just found this one, it’s neat:

XML: Managing Data Exchange

A from-scratch intro to XML. It’s also interesting how this particular project started. From the preface:

Professors typically throw away their students’ projects at the end of the term. This is a massive waste of intellectual resources that can be harnessed for the betterment of many by creating an appropriate infrastructure. In our case, we use wiki technology as the infrastructure to create a free open content textbook.

University students are an immense untapped global resource. They can be engaged in creating open textbooks if the right infrastructure is in place to sustain renewable student projects. This book is an example of how waste can be avoided.

Excellent… maybe students wouldn’t think of their papers as such pointless chores if they knew they weren’t going to end up in a trashcan, but rather, on the net, where other people could learn from them.

How would one grade contributions to a wiki, anyway…

I have been on a bit of a health kick lately… it’ll start showing results eventually… right?

RIGHT???

Anyway… I’ve discovered that the key to being careful about what one eats is pretty simple: you have to plan.

You have to have food around that will make you be not hungry. Which is actually pretty challenging if you’re a live-alone coderbot. So I find stuff like this kind of interesting:

The World’s Healthiest Foods: One Week Menu.

I actually like the idea of someone telling me what to eat. I hate thinking up all that stuff. And I hate going to the grocery store and feeling clueless.

But ideally, what I would want is a sort of web-based menu management thing, that tracks the food I actually have. Why don’t grocery stores let you access your bonus card data online? If they’re going to, should I at least have the option? It is about me, after all… Mmm, yeah, a grocery store with an API. That would rock. And it would win scads of geek converts, I’m pretty sure.

If Whole Foods hooked that up, I bet they would become the Amazon of grocery stores. Imagine all the lists you could build and exchange. They could advertise sales right in the web interface, or even link you to cookbooks wth recipes that match the stuff you like.

That would really be an interesting stomping grounds for a Rails or Django app.

Come to think of it, there are probably a billion “brick and mortar” stores that could benefit from an API… Why can’t I track the books I buy from Borders or Barnes and Noble? Why can’t Starbucks figure out that I’m like, their number one addict customer, and let me see just how frightneing my yearly bill is?

Oh wait, they probably wouldn’t want to do that.

But you get the idea.

Can’t think of anything clever to blog about… not that I usually do, so eh, here’s a list:

David MacKay: Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms The day I understand all of this book is the day I uh… is the day that will never come.

Just bought this: I Am Alive and You Are Dead : A Journey into the Mind of Philip K. Dick: Books: Emmanuel Carrere,Timothy Bent. Might suck, dunno.

An Introduction to Information Theory. J. R. Pierce

Colloquial Greek: A Complete Language Course, Niki Watts I have waaay too many of these book/CD things. Oh well, it’s better than a crack habit.

I really like commentaries on films… in some ways, I think they’re as interesting as the film itself. Usually, I will watch the movie and then immediately watch the commentary. Right now I’ve got Francis Ford Coppola rambling along with The Conversation. I also liked the commentary to Stephen Soderberg’s Solaris quite a bit, and there are many more.

But one thing stands out from watching all these things: movies are mashups.

When you see a film in a theater, what you see is the final product of someone, usually but not always the director, sitting down and deciding on the final cut. They’re working with a bunch of footage, and the impression I get from watching these commentaries is that very often, scenes are completely moved around. In the case of The Conversation, Coppola simply got frustrated with the publicity surrounding his film, and he cut it four days early.

Thus, the entire ending of the movie changed for an external reason. This is a fascinating idea to me, that you can take a bunch of footage and reshape it into endless variations.

Back when he was still being funny, Woody Allen made a hilarious film called What’s Up, Tiger Lily? , where he took an existing Japanese spy movie and redubbed it with completely new English dialog.

It’s pretty sad to see how grasping the movie industry has become with its history, because this kind of thinking is really the way toward originality: blockbusters aren’t making what they used to, and the movie industry is going to have to figure out new business models. Mashups could be one of them, but I think their lack of foresight will lead to Machinima absorbing all that energy.

I didn’t think I would ever find myself thinking that a site that got its started from scratch could come to the point of actually being better than Google, but as far as image searching goes, Flickr really seems to have gotten there–specifically since they added tags.

Case in point: I was messing around with some layout experiments for Blogamundo, and I wanted to know what “splotches” looked like. (Kind of hard to explain the idea…)

Anyway, check out the results for “splotch” on Google Images. Certainly splotchy. But there are some odd ones in there… including a rather unfortunate woman whose jugular seems to be exploding.

O.o

Then I started digging around in Flickr tags:

http://flickr.com/photos/tags/splotch/

http://flickr.com/photos/tags/splotchy/

Etc.

Pretty quickly, I came across a rather amazing (to me, at least) comment:

glueslabs says:

nice detail on concrete.

you should submit this to my new group:

www.flickr.com/groups/splotches/
Posted 8 months ago.

Okay, right. So there is actually like a group of people collecting splotches. 105* photos, of splotches.

Flickr, for the win.

* Um, 107. Since I first wrote this post.