Everything2 New Writeups

transitive property (idea)

2009-11-30T04:41:04Z

Transitivity is a property of relations. Unlike a lot of other mathematical language, it's very intuitive and easy to grasp, so I don't feel bad for writing it in hard math form.

A relation between two sets, A and B, is a set of ordered pairs whose first elements are in A and whose second elements are in B. So the equality relation on the natural numbers looks like {(0, 0), (1, 1), (2, 2), ...}. Or I could form a relation of the Presidents and their years of inauguration like so: {(George Washington, 1789), (John Adams, 1798), ...}.

Okay, that's pretty basic. Well, a relation from a set to itself has the transitive property if, whenever aRb and bRc (that means (a,b) and (b,c) are in the relation), we also know aRc. We want this property in our very nicest classes of relations: equivalence relations, which must also be reflexive…

sheaf theory (idea)

2009-11-30T04:15:45Z

Introduction

Sheaf theory is a subfield of topology that generalizes the notion of gluing continuous functions together and specializes in describing objects by their local data on open sets. Above all, it's a tool, usable to define connectedness, manifolds, the fundamental group, and several other concepts in algebraic topology and differential geometry.

Its history may be more interesting than the subject itself: the French topologist Jean Leray developed it in the oodles of free time he had as a prisoner of the Nazis in Edelbach, Austria. This was part of a general trend that my topology teacher described as "the Nazis' biggest blunder" — while German minds fled as the political climate changed, the imprisoned French did tons of research in prison, so that by the war's end France was the new…

Times New Roman (thing)

2009-11-30T02:53:06Z

Times New Roman is currently one of the most commonly used fonts on the World Wide Web. It is also generally listed as the preferred typeface for most formal paper styles. Though, as Albert Herring observes above, Times New Roman is a rather unpleasant font to read in wide columns, and has drawn general ire from anybody in the typographic community for years, it remains the primary font in use for the simple reason that it is available on almost all computers. Also (or perhaps because of this), the vast majority of word processing applications have set Times New Roman as the default font for body text in documents.

These factors have conspired to make the reading of academic papers vastly more unpleasant than it has to be. The excessive sharpness of Times New Roman's characters and the severe angles at which its serifs proceed from all of the letters make reading text in the font much more unpleasant than it is with fonts like Nimbus Roman, Gentium, and DejaVu Serif, among…

Caspian (essay)

2009-11-30T02:28:14Z

It was cold and raining, and the mare's coat was weird and fluffy in the way it goes during winter. Her mane was absurdly thick and her demure absurdly calm given what the vet was doing to her. The fact that I got to meet her was astounding. Fifty years ago, her kind was thought to be extinct.

In 1957 Louise Laylin, and American, married Narcy Firouz, a fellow student at Cornell. Louise went with him back to his native country, Iran, where she had three children with him, and also established the Norouzabad Equestrian Center for children living in Tehran. However, she struck the issue of finding horses appropriate for young riders. Arabs can often be a handful, especially for a beginning rider, and so she began her quest to find the small horses of rumors living in the villages above the Caspian Sea.

She rode on horseback with several other women to the villages in 1965 and soon discovered the small horse that was subject of ancient carvings, such as those that…

Little Nemo in Slumberland (thing)

2009-11-30T02:26:00Z

"Little Nemo In Slumberland" (later retitled "Little Nemo in the Land of Wonderful Dreams")is the most enduring work of the prolific cartoonist Winsor McCay. The first title ran from October 15, 1905 – April 23, 1911, and the second from April 30, 1911 – July 26, 1914 in the Hearst newspaper syndicate. Both incarnations lacked dailies, spinning lengthy storylines through huge, detailed, full-colored sunday pages. The format of Little Nemo, a story contained withing a dream, originated in McCay's earlier work, "Dreams of the Rarebit Feind." It had no recurring characters, and instead chronicled the nightmares of assorted victims of the eponymous cheese sandwich. It was usually black-and-white, and dream manner tended to be slightly darker than that of its succesor, prompting several modern critics to call it a more grown-up version of Little Nemo.
The protagonist was a boy called, unsurprisingly, Little Nemo, who appeared to be about six years old. His name, which is the latin…

misery loves company (poetry)

2009-11-30T01:34:15Z

A Cowardly Man who Can't Face the Consequences of his Actions on his Own

It wasn't my fault.
It was his fault
and it was her fault
I'm not to blame.

OK, maybe I did do it,
but so did he
and so did her
I wasn't alone.

Fine, I did it myself,
but he helped
and she helped
It was their idea.

OK, it was my idea
but his suggestion
and her suggestion
I just took their thought.

So I'm sorry I wronged you,
but he did too
and she did too
So you can't just single me out.

OK, I did it all myself
But he should be blamed
and she should be blamed
as I can't go through this alone.

War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength (log)

2009-11-30T00:57:41Z

There, in tiny clear lettering, the slogans were inscribed: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. And on the other face of the coin: the head of BIG BROTHER. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette packet - everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you.

somewhere else we
fashioned bluejays from the
winter and outside, found a
shelter in the enclave. Morning
calls apathy and your strange
introductions; running
into the alleyway and the roof
edges at a crux. Everyone sometime
pausing and the clouds are
blushing a dull conclusion, taking
off their masks, they bowed and
came through the entryway, and
everything we intended was…

Science Has No Morals (idea)

2009-11-29T23:37:19Z

Science itself may be amoral, but various social sciences involve the study or analysis of moral systems, from political science to economics to comparative religious studies.

Science also has something to say about contemporary morality as the result of the evolution of cooperation. By cooperation, I don't merely mean negotiation or compromise. I think that implies that the result of cooperation is ultimately not as good as you would like, if you didn't have to do it. In many cases, I would say that's not true at all.

For example, say there were two people on opposite sides of an island, each building their own house. So each of them climbs on ladders, by themselves, outside each of the houses, doing various things. The problem is that by working alone, they risk injury - the ladder may slip without anyone holding it. They also have nobody to hand them tools when they need it, etc etc.

If they worked together to build the houses (ie. cooperation),…

Beelzetruck (essay)

2009-11-29T22:41:59Z

There's a guy in my neighborhood who owns a Dodge Ram. It's a horrendously loud Dodge Ram. The racket it makes could put Manowar's loudest-ever concert to shame; turning the ignition on is like dropping a two-tonne weight on the world's largest whoopee cushion. And this is all because the stupid thing has no muffler.

What do mufflers even cost? Certainly no more than US$100. I mean, you just buy a muffler, have it installed, and suddenly you're not driving the carnival machine from hell anymore. Simple as that. But no, every morning, I, along with the rest of the subdivision, must be subjected to the amplified sound of a thousand people breaking wind until somebody has the sense to complain. (Nobody has thus far, to the extent of my knowledge.)

What motivates this neighbor of mine to drive a machine that sounds like it runs on steroid-laced bean burritos? Surely, to uncover the answer to this riddle is to uncover the answer to the enigmas that motivate evil and cruelty,…

risk reversal (thing)

2009-11-29T22:41:54Z

Introduction

A risk reversal is a combination of options. As such, a risk reversal is an example of an option strategy. In this writeup, we will see how a risk reversal is built, what the potential profit and risks are. This writeup assumes the reader is familiar with what an option is.

How to build a risk reversal

A risk reversal consists of two options with the same time to expiry on the same underlying. The first option is a short out the money call, and the second is a long out the money put. This means that the strike of the put is lower than the call. Normally, the strikes of the risk reversal are both equally far from the current price of the underlying. This strategy has the following payoff at expiration

Below the strike of the put: The call is worthless, and the long in the money put has a value of 1 for each 1 the underlying is below the the strike.
Above the

…

Science Has No Morals (essay)

2009-11-29T22:16:15Z

After watching yet another theological debate where the participants cover old ground, this one a two hour epic from Mexico, I've noticed a few points rear their heads again, and I'd like to discuss one in particular: the idea that science must not replace religion because it doesn't tell people what morals they should have.

It's true that science offers no moral compass. It tells us how the universe works and how the things in it work, and it tells us why they work that way. It doesn't suggest how anything ought to work in an ideal world. It merely illuminates how things do work in the real world.

Most of the time, this is fine. It's both fun and useful to find out things like the size, shape and age of our humble planet, or where all the different species came from. No morals would be expected here.

The apparent problem has come about…

Oddballs (poetry)

2009-11-29T22:08:21Z

Like scalpels and tweezers
Go chainsaws and freezers
Amirite?

Clearly I am a terrorist
Unless there's something you've all missed
As Maxwell Smart would say:
If only he had used his talents
To work for the forces of niceness and goodness
Instead of the forces of rottenness and evil

One of the good guys
I've always been
Though it may not be obv'ous
Unless you have seen
I am a right
Peaceable guy
Really
Ninja and scout
Pyro and spy
Nearly

You couldn't be blamed
Thinking I'm insane
"Look lady
The way I am
Is the way I am
If I scare people
It gives me room"

Life is crazy
This whole world is
Some people are odd
But they do the job
Some fear me
'Cos they don't see
The hundreds of nut-cases
Cov'ring their faces
With secret…

crawl space (poetry)

2009-11-29T21:57:38Z

Dusty, musty smell
Cosy two feet high
A wall behind me
With darkness stretching
In three directions
Crawled on one foot squares
Of particle board

Looked the place over
Torch strapped to my head
A quick inspection
Revealed a large pipe
Ran alongside me
Sewage ran through it
Tied beneath, CAT5
And optic fibre
Sprinkler pipe ahead

I'm in ur ceiling
Scouting another
Abandoned crawl space

Dedicated to raincomplex, keep finding new places.

misery loves company (poetry)

2009-11-29T21:21:29Z

Some of us circle aimlessly like moths,
Buzzing bewildered around a light:
We're bound so valiantly for the moon,
But smash ourselves senseless each and every night.

Some of us are like crows perched on a wire,
Watching the world pass by down below:
Birds of a feather, we flock together,
Because it sure beats being alone.

megapixel (idea)

2009-11-29T21:09:56Z

A megapixel is a unit of measurement for the resolution of digital cameras. Higher megapixel counts are the primary marketing indicator of a higher-quality digital camera. One megapixel is equal to one million pixels. This is about 25% better than 1024x768, a popular screen resolution for computer displays. The ever-increasing resolution on consumer digital cameras is primarily driven by small and smaller charged coupled device arrays getting smaller and cheaper to produce.

Today's average digital cameras typically boast a resolution of over 10 megapixels and can cost under US$150. This is enormously more resolution than the average family vacation photographer needs, and was just a few years ago only available in high-end professional digital cameras. A 1 MP camera easily has enough resolution to display pictures on a computer, the primary advantage to higher resolutions is for printing them. I find that as a rule of thumb, for each megapixel of resolution,…

Google Wave (thing)

2009-11-29T21:05:24Z

Google Wave is Google's attempt to blast every other communication framework out there into the dust. Will it be that successful? I doubt it, but it's still gonna be making waves (ha ha pun) for several years.

If you don't feel like watching the intensely long video that Google recorded when it debuted the software at its I/O conference back in May of 2009, you're in luck. I'm gonna describe Wave to you, though it will probably be a little strange.

Google Wave is the crossbreed of email, instant messaging, wiki, and forums. And that definition itself is probably glossing over half a dozen features that don't come from any of those four technologies. It aimed to combine the best elements of each, and in my opinion, it has. As it is (I'm looking just at the invite-only preview now), there are a lot of rough patches on the software, but it has delivered admirably on it core functionality.

Google Wave is,…

Birth of a Lizard (idea)

2009-11-29T20:52:35Z

In every spare moment, you have been aching to know the origin story of Lizardinlaw. I know this. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Oh. That's the Shadow, not me.

My little sister was diagnosed with breast cancer a few months after getting engaged, apparently publicly online, to some "noder" Brit. He had flown over to California, she had flown to England and they jumped over a damn broom. They both wrote on some weird fucking ass writing site called E2 and that is where they met.

My sister called me after her MRI. "Katy, I saw the films. One side looks like white netting and the other doesn't have any! I'll have to have a mastectomy, won't I?"

"Yes. If they look that different, yes." I am a family practice doctor. I don't read breast MRIs either. But if they look that different, yes, bad.

The British noder was Wertperch, aka Kevin. He dropped everything and…

Heartbreak (thing)

2009-11-29T20:18:52Z

Above, it says that the world is divided into those who have experienced heartbreak and those who have not. For those of you lucky or unlucky to not have experienced heartbreak, I offer you an important warning: "heartbreak" is not a metaphor. "Heartbreak" is not your mind's way of trying to parse and interpret your feelings, or to explain them using poetry. Heartbreak, (and heartbreak can be caused by a number of things, ill-fortune at romantic love being just one of them) is an immediate feeling in the chest. The only thing inaccurate about the metaphor is that (at least for me), I never feel it as a sharp, tearing pain as "break" might suggest. Its more like a dull aching emptiness somewhat akin to getting kicked in the stomach. Only less fun.

money tree (poetry)

2009-11-29T19:07:08Z

It's obvious to see, I'm a money tree
My kids flock by to pick on me
They don't care, until I'm quite bare
Kids grab my leaves and flee

I sit and stare, in my Lay-z-boy lair
The kids won't approach on a dare
Now that I'm free of all my money
I can get some rest, which is rare.

Slimming the Fat Controller: Good MVC Design (how-to)

2009-11-29T18:13:13Z

I once read somewhere that, as a general rule of thumb, the correct way to use an MVC framework is to make sure the models and views are at least as big as the controllers. This is very good advice.

I don't know about anyone else, but when I started out writing projects in CakePHP, I wasn't sure where to put a lot of code and, when in doubt, I put it all in the controllers. After a while, I realised there was a much better way of working: putting pretty much all the code that deals with the database in the models, and pretty much all the code that deals with the user interface in the views, leaving the controllers with just the overall logic of the page to deal with.

Let's look at a concrete example. I worked on a project where people bought products and subscribed to magazines. When I was making the product buying section of the website, I needed to find out if the person who was logged in had to…

iPhone 3G (review)

2009-11-29T17:47:49Z

In September of 2007, I reviewed Apple's iPhone classic. Although it was a beautiful piece of electronics by any standard, it didn't have the expansive software library I'd come to rely on in my Palm Treo. It was with a heavy heart that I returned it to AT&T and went back to my loyal Swiss Army Knife.

Come July of 2008, I tried again with Apple's new iPhone 3G. The 3G has a number of upgrades over the classic version, most importantly the iTunes App Store. It was a whole new experience. The iPhone 3G took everything that was great about the original (covered in my original review, so I won't repeat them here), patched up a few oversights, and fixed almost everything that was lacking. When version 3.0 of the software was released, the iPhone could even finally copy and paste! This feature was long overdue. The iPhone proved itself to be every bit the workhorse my Palm Treo was, but sleeker, faster, and, yes I'll…

pidgin (thing)

2009-11-29T16:06:40Z

Pidgin is an open-source instant messaging client. At the time of writing, it is in version 2.6.2 and is one of the most popular cross-platform, cross-network instant messaging applications.

Pidgin was originally called GAIM, however as a result of a trademark violation claim from AOL, the project renamed itself Pidgin and changed the name of its base library from libgaim to libpurple. The GAIM acronym, which stood for Gtk + AIM, had become somewhat obsolete already, as GAIM supported many other instant messaging networks, so the name change was not especially resisted.

…

Andromeda (thing)

2009-11-29T15:26:35Z

Andromeda was a science fiction TV show based upon leftover material from Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek. It ran on American and Canadian television networks from October 2000 to May 2005.

Andromeda followed the Systems Commonwealth High Guard warship Andromeda Ascendant and its captain, Dylan Hunt, as Hunt attempted to revive the Commonwealth from its destruction 300 years previously in order to defend its old territories from invasion by the Magog.

Characters

Dylan Hunt (Kevin Sorbo) - Captain of the Andromeda Ascendant and the show's main protagonist.
Beka Valentine (Lisa Ryder) - Captain of the Eureka Maru and first officer of the Andromeda Ascendant.
Tyr Anasazi (Keith Hamilton Cobb) - A Nietzschean mercenary who serves as Weapons Officer aboard the Andromeda Ascendant. (Seasons 1-4)
Seamus Harper (

…

and the voice of someone now mute (person)

2009-11-29T15:14:31Z

I enter the silence of the room, a silence that vibrates in my ears. It almost sounds like it's spelling out your name, letter by letter, floating past the middle of it, stroking the a. That's the tone that inclines the change of your name, the tone I can either pressure or soften, sharpen or smooth out. I have the inkling of a feeling that indicates that I might one day be able to do that. Maybe then, once your letters are smoothened into a slab of rock, will I not fade in front of you? Will I not fall, crumble like so many times before? Only this once, touch your name with my hand, hold your name to my heart, in silence. Where there will be no words spoken and no bodily movements, no feet walking away. And won't they say; should it not fill me with dread? Should it not be…

breaking the curse (personal)

2009-11-29T14:18:08Z

We'd been fighting.

He wanted to call off the engagement; I was fighting for it. Surrender no ground, dig my heels in, going from compliant and worshipful to tenacious and fiery in the defense of something that did me no good. Our friends mouthed promises not to take sides. Meanwhile, they did, lining up on both sides, swearing off conflict in favor of whispering behind both of our backs. Hooray for Minnesota Nice.

It seemed unnatural, out of the blue. So when I found the bucket of ashes with the cross dressed in children's clothes in the locked closet of in the basement of the rental house, when I got an explanation for the strange nightmares I'd been having, I jumped in with both eyes wide open, circling in to find the strange symbols that were everywhere, the little crosses, the strange runes, the gaping cracks in the floor and walls despite numerous (recent) mud jobs. At twenty, I wanted an explanation badly enough I could taste it.

Surely he…

Everything2 New Writeups

transitive property (idea)

sheaf theory (idea)

Introduction

Times New Roman (thing)

Caspian (essay)

Little Nemo in Slumberland (thing)

misery loves company (poetry)

War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength (log)

Science Has No Morals (idea)

Beelzetruck (essay)

risk reversal (thing)

Introduction

How to build a risk reversal

Science Has No Morals (essay)

Oddballs (poetry)

crawl space (poetry)

misery loves company (poetry)

megapixel (idea)

Google Wave (thing)

Birth of a Lizard (idea)

Heartbreak (thing)

money tree (poetry)

Slimming the Fat Controller: Good MVC Design (how-to)

iPhone 3G (review)

pidgin (thing)

Network Access

Andromeda (thing)

Characters

and the voice of someone now mute (person)

breaking the curse (personal)