dolphinling’s weblog

http://vdash.org/ looks very interesting. It also looks like the kind of thing that could help me practice with really formalizing my proofs (though I think currently I usually know how, I’m just too lazy).

So I have a paper to research on coding theory (error correcting codes and the like) and I’ve been reading wikipedia pages for a few hours. I go to get a mint and decide it’s time to take a short break while I play around with the circular mints, trying to pack as many into one layer of the container as possible. As I read the wikipedia page on sphere packing, I come across

Sphere packing on the corners of a hypercube (with the spheres defined by Hamming distance) corresponds to designing error-correcting codes: if the spheres have radius d, then their centers are codewords of a d-error-correcting code. Lattice packings correspond to linear codes. There are other, subtler relationships between Euclidean sphere packing and error-correcting codes; thus, the binary Golay code is closely related to the 24-dimensional Leech lattice.

Grr. Stupid wikipedia, I was trying to slack off. >:o

I have never learned so much from, and only rarely been as entertained by, a webcomic as I am by Dresden Codak. I recommend it to anyone who doesn’t mind the fact that they will understand only about 10% of what’s going on.

Dear internets:

Is it possible to make a sentence using only onomatopoeia?

Thank you,

–dolphinling

Average weight of human lungs: 234 g

Average capacity of human lungs: ~6000 cm^3

Density of air: 1.293 g/L

Density of helium: 0.1786 g/L

Weight difference of 6L of air and 6L of helium: 6.686 g

Verdict: No, human lungs will not float if you fill them with helium. :-(

So apparently, no, my body cannot handle giving blood and playing laser tag in the same day. Or it can, it just doesn’t like to.

How do children learn to understand what thinking is, what the word “mind” means? Because I was just thinking about it, and I realized I could not adequately explain either. I know what they are for myself (in that I know when I am thinking, not that I actually know how thinking works), but I’d have no way of explaining what they are nor anything to point to, like I could describe a chair or point to the color blue.

So how do we learn what thoughts are?

How would the stock market react to us suddenly finding martians?

The scene:

• Grey clouds on top, light blue sky in the middle, hills underneath.
• One bare tree in the midleft, and to the right another bare tree, with an evergreen behind and slightly farther right.
• In the front and center, illuminated by sunlight, a tree, bright yellow with its fall leaves.

It may be rather gloomy and brown, but it is stunning.

According to my dentist, flossing is now more important for the health of my teeth than brushing is. While I really should be doing both multiple times a day, flossing often, brushing occasionally is better than brushing often, flossing occasionally. This is very nice, as I can keep floss at my desk, and do it while I procrastinate^W think of what to write, instead of having to get up and go to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

Also, the floss I’m using has surprisingly strong mint smell/taste, much more so than the previous mint flosses I’ve used (even though it’s the same brand and type…). Yum.

This is not medical advise. It’s entirely possible I misheard or something like that.

# emerge -Dtau world

These are the packages that would be merged, in reverse order:

Calculating world dependencies... done!
...
[ebuild  N    ]  games-misc/fortune-mod-chucknorris-0.1

I enjoy physics, but I don’t actually know much, so I have a couple of questions:

• As with any other two bodies, you can have two black holes orbiting around each other. The farther they are from each other, the slower they move, and the closer they are, the faster they move (right?). Would it be possible to have them so close their schwarzschild radii intersect (but their centers are not inside the other’s schwarzschild radius), or would they have to be moving too fast for that?
• If I’m interpreting what I’m reading correctly, a black hole doesn’t have to be infinitely dense, but can instead just be a very large collection of normally-dense matter. Is this right? And if so,
  • Inside this object, some of the gravitational force would be pulling the other way, and thereby lessening the effect. At the very center, the total force would be zero, and choice in movement would be possible! Does this mean there’s a sort of “inner schwarzschild radius” as well, inside which nothing can escape beyond?
    • Could that possibly model our universe?
  • Is it possible to have non-spherical black holes? If you, say, had a very large toroidal collection of matter, could it be large enough that it formed a black hole in the shape of a torus that nothing could escape from inside, but things could pass through the hole?

Short track speed skating is the most awesome winter olympic sport ever.

‘Times New Roman’ is so 27BC. It’d only take one line of css to get something with class. Like ‘Comic Sans MS’. Everyone loves ‘Comic Sans MS’.

That one deserves to go down in the history books.

work n.

Anything that you do that you would prefer to have already done.

(”Have” being a verb, not “have already done” being the past perfect of “do”.)

P.S.: What’s the proper way to mark this entry up?

I have two questions:

First, comic strips are often self referential with their humor. (example) Does anyone know of any novel-type books that do the same?

Second, of those, are there any that have a character proclaiming doomsday as you reach the finish? “The end is near!”

Now back to more productive random curiosities…

I was flipping through the OED for fun today, and I have a new almost-favorite word: Quercivorous. I hope I can use it in Ghost sometime…

I just noticed: XHTML is a subset of both HTML and XML, but {H, T, M, L} and {X, M, L} are subsets of {X, H, T, M, L}. In fact, because of the way adjectives work, that’s always true. Add an adjective to something, and you get a subset of it (pizza, cheese pizza), but if you take their acronyms, it works the other way around. Neat.

Grey needs a little help. If you’re planning on buying something off Amazon.com soon, or getting web hosting, or just have a little money to spare, head on over to RebootMyLife.org.

In a span of about 10 minutes, I’ve just drank 6 cups of water. Not small glasses, but actual cup measurements. That comes out to over 2/3 of a 2-liter bottle. For each cup, I drank it all at once, not stopping for breath. And I would drink more, I think, except my stomach isn’t that big.

I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was—in fact, I hadn’t even realized I was thirsty at all—but it’s quite easy to be deceived by that. Please, if it’s summer where you are, and it’s hot, don’t let yourself get dehydrated. Get something to drink, drink it as you work/play/whatever, and when you finish, get another. You don’t need to be constantly thinking about it, but you’ll be suprised at how much you drink.

This has been a public service announcement from dolphinling.net.

P.S.: Hey, google even says it can improve your skin, reduce your risk of cancer, and help you lose weight. It’s like a miracle drug or something, but free.