Am I the only one... ( Read more... )

( Girl Genius Comic for Monday November 09, 2009 )

<3 Phil and I will be at Windycon this weekend! Yay! Also, We now have SQUEEZY CASTLE WULFENBACH AIRSHIPS in stock! Woo, I say. And also Hoo.

Have been looking at the literature on Functional Reactive Programming and related things. I am learning that no matter how much I think I've properly digested the whole world of monads and arrows and applicative functors, there's always more to learn.

Generally speaking the programmers' approach to all of these concepts seems very weird to me compared to the logician/category-theorist take, but McBride and Paterson's "Applicative programming with effects" is a really awesome paper that synthesizes the two points of view pretty well for the case of applicative functors. The punchline is that what a Haskell hacker calls applicative functors are what a category theorist calls strong lax monoidal functors. Yes, both strong and lax! Terribly, from a terminological point of view, "lax" means that the functor is weaker than "weak", and "strong" isn't the opposite of "weak" (if anything, "strict" is --- but since "lax" exists as a concept, it's hard to say that "strict" is the opposite of "weak", just that it's, ahem, a stronger condition than "weak") and means that the functor has a "strength".

Ok, everybody sufficiently confused now? Good.

The important thing about these strong but sensitive applicative functors is that they represent a notion of effect that is compatible with product types in one direction, and this very compatibility is a notion of sequencing of effects. Suppose T is an applicative functor. If I have a piece of data of type TA, which is a computation returning type A, and a piece of data of type TB, a computation returning B, then I can make T(A × B) by running the first one and then the second. I can't expect to necessarily do the reverse --- I might reasonably encounter a computation T(A × B) that doesn't naturally decompose into TA and TB. This one-way ticket is the laxness. For a weak monoidal functor would commute up to isomorphism with products, and you'd have T(A × B) isomorphic (with suitable coherence diagrams) to TA × TB, but a lax monoidal functor only goes one way. It needs to be a strong lax monoidal functor for the same reason that the monads in functional programming are always strong monads, to be compatible with our expectations about variable contexts.

But wait, I hear you saying, weren't we told that monads were the ultimate story on a pure functional treatment of effects and sequencing and stuff? Answer: they're one story, yes. The intuitive distinction between monads and applicatives (which the paper above explains rather nicely) is that monads, unlike applicatives, let you use the result of one computation to influence which other computation takes place as the second step. Just look at the Kleisli star's type, it's right there:

TA → (A → TB) → TB

The second argument gets the value of type A before it spits out the final computation. If T were just an applicative functor, the most we could make out of TA and (A → TB) would be TTB. When T is a monad, we have exactly the categorical μ to turn that into TB (this is of course exactly how the Kleisli star is implemented from the categorical data T, η, μ) but when T is merely applicative, TTB is considered a more complicated thingy than TB --- it has two stages of computational dependency, which we're not allowed to erase.

http://twitter.com/Othar/statuses/5538674658

Othar: Like all prisoners in the castle, I'm outfitted with an exploding collar. Ha! The fools, my head is the least dangerous part of my body.

I woke up this morning with the word "huitlacoche" in my head and I had no idea why. I looked it up on wikipedia and it turns out it's a weird-ass black, swollen, infected version of corn that some people consider a delicacy.

I was like why do I even know this word.

Then I remembered! I had seen it years ago on Steve don't eat it!, which is great food writing and you should read it all if you haven't already. The your-mom jokes in the Huitlacoche episode are kinda dumb but I like a lot of the other ones and anyhow I take pleasure in reading about another dude eating really gross things so I don't have to.

Have a video of objects and the sounds they make. Trust me - this is *way* more awesome than you'd expect.

http://twitter.com/Othar/statuses/5518668924

Othar: I have been charged with going into Castle Heterodyne and retrieving the Baron's son; Gilgamesh. Alive. Unharmed. Sane. Two out of three?

Once again I encountered an attitude that always surprises me. I was accused of attacking the Bible when I said that it contains events that, from my external point of view, can only be described as deity approved horrors. Yet this same individual did not consider it an attack when they said that someday I would be forced to kneel before God and would go to hell or when they said that loving, committed, same-sex relationships are an affront on morality.

To some degree, all humans fall prey to the bias of their own perspective. Both of us considered ourselves to be making statements which, from our own point of view, fall under the category of painful truths, not attacks.

Yet I have found that some Christians (not all) quickly jump to the conclusion that atheists are on the offensive when they say anything less than complimentary about religion. They assume that a very specific comment has a very general meaning. Often, these same Christians then go on to say things as bad or worse than what was said to them, but they do not see themselves as attacking and claim innocence if their statements are pointed out.

An much smaller subset turns this into a persecution complex. These are people who really believe there is a war on Christmas. They truly believe that they are like the early Christians and society is trying to crush them out of existence. When you point out that Christians are the vast majority in this nation, they claim that most of those people are not "real Christians" (I always imagine that followed by a trademark symbol). Fortunately, these people, despite their prevalence on the internet, are a small group.

In the end, this biased perspective no longer makes me feel angry or hurt or insulted. But it has become tiresome.

Poll #1482290 daemon
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 59

How do, or would you, pronounce "daemon", when used to refer to a unix background process?

I don't want to start a flamewar over correct pronunciation, but I realized that I am not sure what other people say.

I have a special offer to Girl Genius fandom — in Second Life, the Consulate of Europa Wulfenbach staff have, for the second year, organised and published a Shirtless calendar to raise funds for breastcancer.org. Now, the conversion rate between 'lindens' (the Second Life in-world currency) and U.S. dollars is roughly L$265/US$1, but that does not take away from the fact that a year of calendar and coffeetable book sales has raised over L$22,000 for the cause - and the new calendar has already raised over L$20,000!

You have an opportunity to participate this year without having to worry about making an account, or fussing with hardware minimums.



These aren't just pretty pictures of half-dressed Jägers (and others) - these have a full range of religious, civil, astronomical and technological holidays and observances. All the eclipses are marked, too. Each page is 512x1024 pixels, 8-bit colour, JPG-format files.

This year, there are four editions of calendars:

Ladies

Gentlemen

Jägerkin

Fur & Fin

(Yes, I know a Jäger is also on the Ladies' calendar, but she was really appropriate.)

Anyone who donates to breastcancer.org (they take Visa , Diner Club , Discover , American Express , MasterCard AND PayPal) will get an e-mailed receipt acknowledging your donation (any donation worth bothering with will be equivalent to the purchase price in Second Life). E-mail your receipt to sff dot corgi at gmail dot com with any secure information removed, but with the headers retained, and you will receive the calendar of your choice, all twelve pages, zipped into one file for easy handling. Anyone who donates in the double-digits, U.S. currency, will get the whole set of four calendars.

And you'll never know who you'll find with their shirt off in these things....

Erika is out of town again, so I'm going to leave the main course up for grabs. We will provide homemade pumpkin pie (as a test for Thanksmas), and Dave already brought some ice cream to go with, so we are fairly set for dessert. Everything else is available.

Sounds like Othar's Twitter is FINALLY catching up with the comic...
http://twitter.com/Othar

I just discovered the phrase "white trash", used in its present sense, in an H.P. Lovecraft story published in 1919. I had no idea it was that old.

Game day is next Saturday, November 14! Please let us know if you think you might make it.

Within the next couple weeks we'll start organizing Thanksmas. Mark your calendars!

An observation on researching problems you are not an expert at, or, "Why I am not a kook".

This happens to me occasionally that I get interested in a cute little problem, (e.g. graph reconstruction) think about it for a while, come up with some partial results, and then poke at the literature and quickly go ohhhhh shittttt people have really studied this, and a single section of their papers has way more insight than I could expect to generate if I slogged away at the problem for a month.

Which is okay, since I'm not going to slog away at it for a month, but rather go back to working on problems I can make headway on. But it's still fun to play with such things, and a good sort of exercise to wrestle with new problem domains.

I think all it takes to go off the deep end into kooksville is to forget this last step of being at least a token amount of welcoming to other people's ideas.

Anyway, case in point (of other people doing awesome work, not of people being kooks) is David Rivshin's master's thesis which has some algorithmic cleverness that let him computationally determine a whole ton of statistics on graphs that are sort of "trying to be counterexamples" to the reconstruction conjecture. In particular on page 19 there are a few pairs of graphs that have 7 "cards" in their "deck" (i.e. vertex deletions) in common! I managed using some dumb perl scripts to find a pair of 8-vertex graphs with 6 in common, and determined that there were no 9-vertex graph pairs with 7 in common but after that bumped up against the fact that there are like 12 million 10-veretx graphs, and finding pairs of things in a 12 million member set that satisfy some property sounds very 72 trillionish, and that's no good for anybody.

Also, Bowler, Brown, Fenner's "Families of Pairs of Graphs with a Large Number of Common Cards" [sorry, I can't find a copy not behind a !@#$ paywall] has a nice construction on page 16 that yields as many overlaps as you want; if you want n nonisomorphic co-occurring vertex deletions, you need a pair of graphs of (asymptotically) 5n vertices. (note the paper says effectively 5n/2, because it's thinking about multisets of vertex deletions, whereas I'm thinking about sets, and the deletions come in isomorphic pairs) You basically take a line graph with a pair of dangling degree-1 vertices hanging off it every three vertices:

   o        o        o
   |        |        |
o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o
   |        |        |
   o        o        o

and the other graph is a ring graph with, again, a pair of danglies every third vertex of the ring except exactly one of the danglies (just one, globally) is missing. This is harder to ASCII-ize, but imagine:

       o                 o
       |                 |
...-o--o--o--o--o--o--o--o-...
       |        |        |
       o        o        o

where those outer two half-edges are supposed to wrap around and connect. The way this generates lots of different common vertex deletions is this: imagine cutting the ring graph on one of the ring vertices without bits dangling off of it. This creates a line graph with one danglie-thing missing somewhere, but all of the somewheres are non-isomorphic to one another, and the original line graph can be made isomorphic to this one by chopping off exactly one dangling vertex.

There's something I really like about both of these works that seems ubiquitous and useful in dealing with really hard conjectures about the existence of mathematical objects --- that is, looking for a quantitative sliding scale at the one end of which the conjectural thing might or might not exist. The win is that (at least in this case) you can write programs to hunt around for the almost-counterexamples, the close calls, the weird outliers, and hopefully learn something from them. Looks as if graph reconstruction is still quite tough after all this data has come pouring in, but it's neat to think about.

About several months ago, I spent some time in New York, mostly with Ken and sometimes with other people. I went to two birthday events for Ken and it was pretty good. I also saw the High Line, which was ok. Then I went home to see my parents some more. We went into New York again and saw the Skyscraper Museum (awesome) and the High Line again.

Then I went to Pittsburgh. I hung out with Chris and Lea and jcreed and gwillen and William and Alan and some other people. There was a Seven party, which should have been mildly awkward (I am a bit too old for college parties) but instead was awesome due to the conglomeration of old people hanging around outside and the drunken type theory. The Underground Tour happened, but I missed it because it was only three hours (!!!!!!) and started at seven (!). I had eat'n'park with Alan in the middle of the night and went to jcreed's party (during to the UGT), which existed because he is now in Philadelphia. Lea and I hung out in a coffeeshop but not quite enough.

Then I came to Seattle. I hung out with Cynthia and Karl a lot until other people got back from the summer, and then I hung out with the other people and them. Amanda now lives in my house which is pretty cool. Alice, Tom and Jess now live in San Francisco, which is significantly less cool.

I went to Alice, Tom and Akiva's housewarming in San Francisco. The morning of, I watched several people move Akiva's stuff into their house. Then Tom, Akiva and Jess' POD arrived via a mechanism only slightly less awesome than orbital drop, but with more pneumatics. I helped carry stuff up the stairs, and put Jess' stuff in a UHaul, which was driven to Jess, Brewer and cprides and helped carry it up the stairs. Then we got alcohol with a UHaul and prepared the house for a party.

The party itself was pretty awesome from my perspective; it was good to see all those people at once again.

The next day, on not enough sleep, Akiva, Dan Blanford, Carolyn and I participated in a puzzle hunt, which was ok but would have been awesome on more sleep. Then we had a quick dinner with Tom and Alice and I returned to Seattle.

At some point my sister returned from the Frozen North. She brought my parents, who had spent the last parts of the trip on her ship. We went to a lot of delicious restaurants and also to Bainbridge Island, via ferry.

At some point before or after that, there was a Math Party in our house, which involved lots of drunk mathematicians and was pretty fun, except for the drunk, bitter Chinese man shouting about politics.

About a week ago, I went out to dinner with my sister, just returned from firefighting-and-surviving-chemical-attack school in Florida, for her birthday.

I did almost nothing of interest on Halloween.

Tonight after TGIF, I went to dinner with Jacob, Glibert, V, Justine and another ex-undergrad named Mike. Then we (minus Jacob) went to Solstice. Now, work?

It looks like I will not be going to the CTY New Years reu, which makes me sad. However, I will be going to Istanbul instead, which is super awesome!

There has been a lot hype about Verizon's new Android phone, cleverly named Droid. Reviews have been mostly positive overall, but I find myself wondering: What does it offer the consumer that the iPhone does not allready offer (in many cases in a more polished form?) The answer I have come away with is, not a whole lot. Touted features like open development (which frankly is kinda vague) and multi-tasking aren't particularly important to your average consumer. It isn't going to make checking their e-mail, browsing the internet or tweeting on twitter or facebook any better. Their music and media browsing and viewing experience is still great*, in fact the lack of media sync on the Droid (its all drag and drop) hurts the regular user here a bit.

On the other hand what does it offer the geek? Quite a bit, and their advertising reflects this. Open development (in the sense of no limitations on what an app can do at least), ease of tweaking the device to do strange and powerful things, multi-tasking, etc. now become useful selling features.

But as Nintendo and Apple have discovered geeks are a small fraction of the larger group of People Who Buy Stuff (tm). My little sister has an iPod touch, my dad really wants an iPhone, these aren't tech savvy people. To them the Droid features that the iPhone doesn't offer are basically meaningless, so the question for them is, does Android offer the ease of use and ability to do things that the iPhone does. In short, does it help me do what I want it to do. For most people the answer is probably not.

Make no mistake Android is still leaps and bounds beyond the pre-iPhone smart phone OS's, and current non-smart phone devices. If using AT&T is not an option, or not a desired path for you, then the Droid (and other Android phones) are pretty good devices to consider. Although the app market for Android isn't as robust as the iPhones, its certainly growing and should give you most of what you would want, especially as a casual phone user looking for the latest casual game or twitter client.

As someone who is a satisified iPhone user Android, Blackberry, WebOS and their various hardware incarnations are important to me only in what they might do to spur Apple to improve its product. Unfortunately I haven't seen many features or improvements that are compelling enough that I think it would push Apple, so I am left relying on Apple's own internal drive to make great products for the bulk of future iPhone improvements, atleast in the short term. Still, good luck to the Droid, more options and more competiton are definitely to our benefit as consumers.

* Listening to streaming music like Pandora in the background is about the one area I think the average user would beneift from background app support and I hope Apple considers allowing it on a case by case basis for just such examples.

http://twitter.com/Othar/statuses/5486974139

Othar: I don't remember much about Grantz capturing me. It was fast, confusing and rather unsporting. Probably a perfect job in her eyes. Now what?

I might get it now that Kael is at daycare. Last night, not so much. Kael's been sick with a cold, meaning he basically can't breathe through his nose. This has a couple of important ramifications. One, his sleep is much lighter than usual. Two, nursing becomes a race between my body getting the message (i.e., letting down) and Kael suffocating. Shockingly, when he's tired and hungry at 1 (and 2 (and 3)) in the morning, Kael is not a big fan of this race. We finally cracked and bottle-fed him at 4 am.

So yeah. Maybe an hour of sleep before he broke, and then basically no sleep until 5 means one thing: impromptu vacation day! :-) Well, and doing my best zombie impression. BRAAAAINS! Although I would settle for just my brain. Anyway, it's a good thing Kael's cute. He seems to understand this, as he was especially cute when he woke up at 9 this morning. All playful and chatty, and fascinated with my belly button.

Further evidence of cuteness:


And though he isn't smiling in this one, I really like it for some reason: